I’m definitely favoring MarsEdit over Ecto. But as I’m on the subject, I felt the urge to bring to attention some features that would make me love MarsEdit even more. I’m not calling these feature requests, because I can live without most of these. I’m using the app just fine right now.
In No Particular Order
Flickr Uploading/Image Manipulation * Not a big deal, but it could streamline the process. * I’m loving Quicksilver’s Flickr plugin, anyway.
Default “Preview Text Filter” Refer to this tweet. Fixed.
* Saves me a couple clicks per post.
* All I do is write in Markdown anyway.
Larger Tag Field * One line isn’t enough, and I don’t want to stretch the post window wider than it has to be. Can it grow horizontally?
Default Category Selection * Not a big deal, because I know what is the default one, but I have a feeling xmlrpc.php doesn’t give this information.
Opening Multiple Posts * In the Local Drafts Folder, I want to go back to my workflow quickly by opening all the posts I’m working on. * Also, each post should remember where it was… but I don’t know much about Cocoa… * Heck, implement shortcut-able tabs like TextMate. Then again, this just might be the TextMate user in me.
Better Handling Of Previous Posts * I’d love to be able to have my entire blog locally and have it be stable… I’m very very afraid of hitting refresh right now. * I did it just now to prove a point. My CPU is getting hammered, most likely parsing through all the posts. * and this leads into my next request…
Ability to have a local database of ALL tags * I’ve pulled down 10000 posts to grab the tag data, but it doesn’t seem like tags are not saved from posts that were not posted through MarsEdit. Bummer.
Random Tag Feature Request * If I tagged a post that was not saved or posted, it shouldn’t remember it. Or maybe it should… I feel like this should be modifiable.
Portability * I want to be able to edit on-the-go. The actual drafts are located deep within ~/Library. I would much rather have it saveable to a certain location so I can get at the text files, if needed.
And that’s all for now. I hope Jalkut’s reading, heh. I just used MarsEdit for a week or so, and I’m loving it.
All this Mac application reviewing is making me want to do something in Cocoa. Maybe next week.
Thanks for the ideas. I am reading
Lots of what you're suggesting is on my radar already. Some of them are finer points I haven't noticed but will log in my bug system (e.g. tags that don't get sent to the blog shouldn't be saved in history).
As for the tags from old posts, this is something that would be easier if the blog systems did a better job of exposing them all in one spot. Generally speaking MarsEdit can't get at an easy to access list of all the tags ever used. As a compromise, I want to add functionality to at least collect tags from the posts that are refreshed, but of course that only covers the last “N” posts…
Daniel