infinite sushi

Reblogged from infinite-sushi.com:

After 6 years of developing, maintaining and improving ecto, I felt it was time to move on. From now on, the new owner of ecto will be illumineX, inc. Instead of one guy working on your favorite blog client part-time, you'll now have a team of developers working on ecto full time. Before I decided to sell ecto, I had a long correspondence with Gary Longsine, the CEO of illumineX. I wanted to make sure it will continue to be in good hands. I found Gary to be a great guy and he convinced me that his team has many new ideas that will keep ecto growing in functionality and power. In fact, they have already developed a blog client for iPhone based on ecto's code base. I helped out with a few tricky XML-RPC and Atom issues and I was very impressed with how quick the illumineX team picks up things and how fast they work.

I will remain involved with ecto as a consultant and it's very likely I will develop custom plugins (I already wrote an iTunes plugin). I will always be a fervent user of ecto, so obviously I'd like to see it continue the excellent job it's been doing. You will also still find me in the support forum.

It does feel odd to let go of something that has been my flagship product and my precious for so long. I put many hours in it and I take much pride in having created ecto. But it remains in capable hands and I now have the opportunity to spend my free time on new things.

If you have any questions about the transfer of ecto to illumineX, feel free to post them in the comments section of the original post.

Starting with ecto version 3b41 you can refer to drafts with an URL scheme, which looks like, for example:

x-blogpost://6449f44a102fde848669bdd9eb6b76fa@ff4d5bd026cb03f18a557ba2b651722b

The URL has two components separated by an '@' sign. The first one is the MD5 of the draft's identifier and the second is the MD5 of the account this draft belongs to. You can use either 'x-blogpost:' or 'x-blogpost://', although the latter works better with Safari.

To create a URL reference to a draft, the easiest way is to drag and drop an item from the main window's list of drafts into an editing area. This works in TextEdit as well, for example. Clicking a x-blogpost: URL will open the corresponding draft in ecto.

UPDATE: After discussion with ecto users and Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater, the plan is to use x-blogpost: (instead of my original draft:) to avoid possible collisions and to allow for use by other blog clients as an unofficial standard.

You can get the URL via AppleScript as well. Example:

tell application "ecto"
  set account_list to accounts whose name is "foo.com"
  set a to first item of account_list
  properties of a
  set blogs_list to blogs of a
  set b to first item of blogs_list
  properties of b
  tell b
    set entry_list to entries of b
    set e to first item of entry_list
    tell e
      get href
    end tell
  end tell
end tell

Starting today, Alex Hung and I will develop our products separately. We started a partnership a few years ago to release our blog clients under the same banner. At that time, I was a full-time software developer at Kula Co. Ltd. However, I'm now working for Technorati Japan and Alex has a lot more commitments with a new full time job. I also have some changes coming up in my personal life with have less time to devote to administrative matters related to the sales of the Windows version of ecto. We have been developing independently as well, so at this point a partnership does not make much sense anymore.

Alex Hung will continue developing ecto for Windows under a new name from his own mineblogging.com domain. He has some good changes planned that will benefit Windows users greatly. The new Windows support forum is at http://mineblogging.com/support.

ecto for Mac itself will enjoy a 100% dedication.

Although our software partnership has ended, I gain a good friend in Alex Hung, which is more important.

ecto3 has been in beta for a while, even though it's been release mode stable for quite a few versions. It's time to actually take it out of beta, so I'm starting to work on localization.If you're interested to translate ecto in your language, drop me a line using the contact form.

Update: Localization in progress for languages:

• Finnish
  
• French
• Russian
• Spanish

Update: Localization included in latest beta for:

• Arabic
• Chinese
• Danish
• German
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Taiwanese

Thanks much all!