RandyRants: SharpMT 3.1

Randy No Arms' ongoing commentary on life, gaming, and the rest of the world.

SharpMT 3.1

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SharpMT: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 at 09:03 PM by Randy

A highly recommended upgrade, focused mostly on bug fixes.

Download SharpMT: EXE | MSI

View SharpMT FAQ: FAQ

Download: .NET Framework, version 2.0 (required to run SharpMT 3.1)

Three major updates to for this new release:

The Crash On The Menus When No Drafts Were Open - this was the driving force for this update. The version is 3.1 - rather than 3.0.1 - because .0 releases make my feet itch. Anyway, there was an old bug that returned to life and had to be shot dead again. The bug was that if you moved your mouse over a menu and a draft wasn't open, it would throw an exception. Not so bad, right? Wrong: the initial state on a new installation is a SharpMT window without a draft open! This is now fixed - if there's any additional errors like this, please let me know ASAP.

New encodings - this one was by request and something that should have been done a while ago, but I guess I over looked it. Characters like “ ” and ‘ and ’ are now encoded to their Unicode equivalent. The goal of this is to ease copying from other web sites and pasting into a SharpMT draft. As part of this little experiment, I attempted to turn on the encoding support for non-Latin based foreign languages: it's even more screwed up now than it was in version 2.6 and I believe it's because of my inexperience with the new Framework. No ETA on it, but for right now, it's off the TODO list.

Keywords field - I moved the keywords text box to the Main tab, keeping the UI of SharpMT more in line with TypePad. Also, the font of this text box is tied to the font of Entry Body, Extended Entry, and Excerpt. I hope people like it, because it's staying this way - call it the perk of being the author of the tool! I only recently started to use the field and discovered that it shares the same row as Excerpt on the TypePad web UI... so it's doing the same thing here. If you minimize the bottom pane, both text boxes get minimized - it's function and functionality remain unchanged; this is simply a cosmetic change.

It's available for download now: EXE | MSI

Screenshots: One | Two | Three

Comments: (10)

(latest)

Posted on: December 13, 2005 at 12:11 PM by Paul Philippov

Hey Randy. Can you make SharpMT to work with non-ASCII code? I've just learned it can't show umlauts nor cyrillic characters in informational windows. And even message to my blog written in Russian got posted as a bunch of question marks.
I've sent screenshots to your email address.

Posted on: January 17, 2006 at 05:22 PM by Jake Ortman

OK, Randy, I just ran into this one today that I hadn't seen before (and was working fine until today). But whenever I post from SharpMt, I get the following dialog box:

---------------------------
SharpMT
---------------------------
The remote server returned an error: (406) Not Acceptable.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

That's a new one for me -- ideas, Randy? Don't make me continue to use the MT interface ;-)

Posted on: January 17, 2006 at 05:56 PM by Randy

Ummmm... TypePad or MT?

Posted on: January 19, 2006 at 02:51 PM by Jake Ortman

Sorry, MT 3.2. Naturally, today it's not giving me that error (of course, I moved my site to a new server yesterday so [shrug]).

Posted on: January 19, 2006 at 07:20 PM by Randy

Yeah - not a clue. If it's a 406 error, it's probably coming from the web server and #MT (or the .NET Framework) is simply passing that on...

Glad it's cleared up though!

Posted on: January 19, 2006 at 11:38 PM by sschafer

Is the auto-fill of the image name (on the Upload Image dialog) broken in 3.1? Or has it been changed?

With 3.0, I can use the Browse button to find and select an image and the filename is automatically appended to the path name.

With 3.1 this doesn't happen--I have to manually type in the name (annoying since I rarely change it).

???

Posted on: January 20, 2006 at 07:52 AM by Randy

Odd. I just tried it here and it works OK. It's not a feature I use, except for testing - it was put in there by user request.

Even though it shouldn't matter, what OS are you on?

Posted on: January 20, 2006 at 10:46 PM by sschafer

Ugh. I just reinstalled and it works fine.

Sorry.

Nothing to see here, people, move along.

Posted on: February 01, 2006 at 09:05 PM by Cody

I am using the latest version of MovableType (3.2) and v3.1 of your application. I am 100% positive that my connection information is configured properly, but no matter what I try I keep getting "invalid login" when I try to refresh blogs. I have 2 blogs configured on my site. 1 with 1 category, 1 with 3. Not sure if that makes a difference or not.

Posted on: May 11, 2006 at 04:49 PM by TimmyB

To Cody (above),

Moveable type 3.2 has introduced a seperate password fields for API's.

Log in as the user you want to use and on the main screen click your "username" (it's a link), scroll down and set API Password field.

Simple, but should be documented somewhere..