GitHub: SharpMT is an offline Blog writer that is designed for MovableType based systems. There are three versions of the application: desktop, PocketPC, and SmartPhone, all of which share the same file format for offline drafts. The project files included have three different versions – one for each platform – as well as installation and help system project files.

It’s alive!

Home page: SharpMT’s GitHub home page

Binaries: SharpMT 4.0

Discussions: SharpMT forum

Don’t get excited by the jump to 4.0 – there’s no new features in there. I just wanted a way to differentiate between my last released version (3.3) and the version that made its way into the wild.

In fact, because of the license agreement with Spellican – who seems to have all but disappeared; if they go out of business am I still bound? Anyway, I had to pull spell checking support from the public release of source code. Not too painful (since the initial versions didn’t ship with it) but it would have been nice to include it.

Then there was the general clean up of all the stuff: comments, locations, etc. The tree isn’t as clean as I usually like to see it but it works (and the process is even documented!) A lot more work than I expected, getting all the bits gother, but this is also why I was hesitant to release it in the first place.

What does all this mean to you, the users of SharpMT?

I’m out :) I mean, not completely out, like I’m nuking the server or pulling the 3.3 version!

Besides, the nice thing about GitHub is that I can still contribute the active project, if I want to, but the truth is that I haven’t worked on SharpMT in over a year. Features-wise, I’ve done all that I’ve wanted to. I’ve done more than I’ve wanted to actually, adding features that a number of people requested but I had no use for. Either way, I’ve definitely hit a plateau with the current feature set. I’ve even considered giving Windows Live Writer or Ecto for Windows a try: they support all of the extended MT features now… worth a look. Even if I still with SharpMT, I doubt I’ll ever have reason to move off version 3.3.

Thanks for all the input, advice, and support that you SharpMT users have given me over the years – this little science project of mine wouldn’t have gotten this far without all of the feedback and drive. It’s been a hell of a ride!

(and as people work with the SharpMT 4 source code I’ll be blogging about that too!)