Hi, my name is Ian Beck, and I’m very happy to announce that I’m now a full-time member of MacRabbit! Jan was having fun working on the latest and greatest improvements to Espresso and CSSEdit, but he had a problem: his supply of carrots kept running low and Norbert was getting antsy.
“Ian,” he said to me, “this just won’t do. How good are you at harvesting carrots? And incidentally I could also use someone to help out with support and quality assurance.”
“Well,” I replied, “that sounds like fun, but what’s in it for me?”
“How do you feel about fresh radishes?” said he. “Oh, and helping make Espresso even more fantastic than it already is?”
I don’t know how he guessed, but I’ve always been a sucker for really crisp, fresh radishes.
Starting today, I will be handling the bulk of MacRabbit’s support, doing quality assurance, developing internal Sugars, and just generally making sure that using MacRabbit products is as easy and care-free as can be for you folks. I’ve been developing Sugars and themes for Espresso on my own time since the early semi-private betas, so I’m ecstatic to finally be able to give Espresso and CSSEdit my complete focus and offload some of the tasks from Jan that were slowing down the pace of development.
I look forward to talking with you in the forums and via our support email!
Time for an update! Espresso 1.1.1 is now available for everyone’s enjoyment. Version 1.1 adds pixel dimensions for image previews, RegEx searches for Find in Project, and a boatload of small but awesome improvements. Start your auto-updaters now, or hop over to the release notes for all the details!
It’s been a blast reading all the funny nags we’ve been sent! The following users and their friends are now happy Espresso owners. Congratulations on having a great sense of humor!
- Day 1: Frank Jonen
- Day 2: Kaylo Naivaklam
- Day 3: Mike Mullikin
- Day 4: Christoph Budzinski
- Day 5: Martin Taylor
- Day 6: Giulio Lucci
- Day 7: Shan Huang
- Day 8: John Sjöberg
- Day 9: Chris Kinsman
- Day 10: Mark Howson
- Day 11: Brian Morykon
We’ll be updating this post as the Funny Nag Contest goes on. An important note: there’s no need to send your idea on a specific day to have a better chance of winning. Every day we take our favorite of all the nags we’ve received so far. Today was definitely a challenge, because there were lots of really fun entries!
Xmas is near, and we come bearing gifts. Espresso 1.1 is now available, all ready to be unwrapped! It has been an eventful year at MacRabbit, which makes us extra happy to deliver this major update to you all. What’s new? Tons of stuff, but here are the highlights: Find in Project! Projects! Revamped Workspace! Image Preview! Manual Publish! Excuse the exclamation marks, but Espresso 1.1 is a better app in every way. See for yourself: learn more and download it now.
Xmas is near, 11-days-near to be precise. Seeing all those ones makes you want to add more, so every day the next 11 days we are giving away 1+1 copies of Espresso 1.1. How do you win a copy for yourself and a friend? By being part of a MacRabbit tradition: the Funny Nag Contest! Invent a hilarious and convincing demo “buy now” message for Espresso. Nags can be stories, dialogues, statements, really anything. Send your ideas to @espressoapp on Twitter or mail them to espresso@macrabbit.com. Every day until Xmas we will pick our favorite nag in the pool and surprise the author.
We wish you Happy Holidays, Espresso 1.1 delight, much inspiration and an excellent sense of humor!
Hello everyone! We’re preparing for a brand new 2010 here at MacRabbit and we’d like to end 2009 on a positive note. Espresso will receive a major update to 1.1 in December. It will feature project-wide search as well as a brand new Project Organizer. There are workflow enhancements all over the application and we hope we’ve addressed every known stability issue.
If you like Espresso now, you will love 1.1. If you haven’t made up your mind, we invite you to give it a whirl in less than a month!
“Is MacRabbit dead”? A question I never expected to read, and one I will hopefully never see again. But it has been asked and needs an answer: “it’s alive”!
Few people know this, but MacRabbit was a one-student venture for a long time. It was born out of a love for beautiful design and software, and slowly grew from a hobby to something resembling a one-man company. For Espresso, a great friend stepped in to become the second developer/rabbit. The rush of creating an awesome new app made us announce early, but then life caught up with us and took revenge.
Lénaïc and I started our last year at university after the announcement, which turned out to come with a crazy workload while feedback for Espresso was reaching unprecedented volumes. Long story short, juggling this double life led to the current situation where people wonder if MacRabbit lives. This is unacceptable. I would like to apologize for the situation and commit to a brand new MacRabbit.
We will soon both be working on our software full-time, which means the extreme interference caused by our academic lives is at an end. MacRabbit 2.0 starts today, but it will take a while to rectify the mistakes 1.0 made. At the moment we are systematically going through our e-mail feedback and while we may not be able to reply to every single feature idea, please be sure we’re taking note of your requests.
Expect an Espresso maintenance update soon, which will bring us one step closer to the goal of making our FTP engine compatible with nearly everything. Be sure to send any server problems to us, as it is the only way we can know and do something about it. To make the development process a bit more manageable, we’ll also be switching back to hand-picked Kaboom testers that are happy to test unfinished releases. Simultaneously, we’re working on the more significant 1.X Espresso releases that will gradually add many of the most obvious features. We’ve also learned our lesson when it comes to pre-announcing, so we won’t be saying anything about what or when.
Last but not least we would like to thoroughly thank our most awesome users, who have been supportive even at the worst of times. We’ve made it hard for you at times, but we’re dedicated to restoring your trust as MacRabbit evolves into a true company with a bright future ahead of it.
Jan and Lénaïc (also, Norbert the magical rabbit)
Hello everyone. Since the release of Espresso 1.0, we’ve been hard at work to make it into the great editor you all want it to be. Some of that work goes into bug fixes, some of it is preparing for new features. We recognize that Espresso is still in its infancy and that there are some lingering issues, so we’re focusing on ironing out the bugs before adding cool new stuff!
Unfortunately, that process has been hindered because of broken auto-updating up to version 1.0.1. Up to now, Espresso didn’t check for new versions on launch which hid great improvements from many of our users. Version 1.0.2 (out now) sports a fixed auto-updater along with many other improvements, so we’d like everyone to update their copy as soon as possible! Tell your Espresso-using friends and spread the word: Check for Updates under the Espresso menu.
We’ve been receiving tons of feedback about Espresso, which we’re going through as fast as we can. We try to respond to your e-mails, but due to the sheer volume of feedback we may not be able to reply personally to every feature request. Even when you don’t receive an acknowledgement of your feedback, know that it’s not going into a black hole. Thanks for shaping the future of Espresso!
A long, long time ago in a galaxy very nearby, we wanted a HTMLEdit to go with CSSEdit. Over time, this idea grew from “let’s make a HTML editor” to “let’s make a foundation that can make editing any language as fun as styling in CSSEdit”. Today, Espresso 1.0 is our first step towards that goal: an efficient, powerful development tool with finesse.
If you’ve been testing the Public Beta (thanks!), you’ll find new features that make your life even easier: Quick Publish for easy uploading and sleek Snippets with powerful dynamic options. For new arrivals, Espresso still follows the same formula: power editing, blazingly fast publishing, previewing and much more — all wrapped in a slick interface.
Grab a coffee and… give Espresso 1.0 a whirl!
After a long, long wait we’re incredibly happy to tell you that the first public release of Espresso is available! You can get it now at the Espresso website. This release is a Public Beta, so it is not yet finished.
Espresso PB1 comes with a powerful text core, and contains default support for HTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript (more Sugars are already available, but we decided not to include them yet). Previewing has Overrides just like CSSEdit, so updates are smooth and easy. Publishing offers you fool-proof synchronization, and a complete Browse mode for FTP, SFTP and S3. To get a first feel of Espresso, go try it out!
A Public Beta is not the 1.0 we expected when we announced it. We would like to explain why we dropped this ball, for those who have been anxiously awaiting a release. MacRabbit is currently two guys, and we are both still studying. Our academic workload this year was a lot heavier than we anticipated, and progress suffered as a result. Espresso is an ambitious project, so its complexity might have caused a delay in any case. Our biggest mistake was announcing too early.
With all this in mind, we’re now going into When It’s Ready mode. There’s still a lot of work to be done! New Public Betas will appear as we’re moving towards 1.0. A very happy 2009 to everyone! — Jan & Lénaïc
As many of you have noticed, November has come and gone without seeing an Espresso release. The main reason Espresso is still vaporware for you (unless you are a tester) is that we underestimated the amount of work that goes into documenting and polishing the inner workings of an extensible engine. CSSEdit was very much closed off like any traditional app, so exposing Espresso’s guts to the cruel outside world was uncharted territory for us. As a result, we’re only now approaching the point where we feel comfortable giving it to the general public. Stay tuned for more.
In CSSEdit related news, the “CSS editor that could” was honored with a Macworld Eddy. Many thanks to Macworld for an awesome end of 2008!