As I started to prepare to do a massive review of both Ecto and MarsEdit, I’ve been also looking into one of the newer Mac blogging app on the market, Blogo.
Cons
You know it’s not gonna be good when I start out with the cons.
Single window for editing isn’t very good. As I’m writing this, I have 4 MarsEdit window open, copying and pasting portions of texts between posts as I see fit. It might be just me, but I think most people also would benefit from being able to have multiple drafts open.
Also, the UI makes this app behave a little differently than your average Mac app. The buttons look a little nicer, but if this is causing my bugs, I’d rather have a vanilla looking app. Try blockquoting a couple times and try to get rid of it: I can’t. Since I can’t open up a new post, I’m just stuck with what looks like this.
The entire white box is where you’re supposed to be able to type. The grey area is supposedly the blockquote… and I can’t delete this blockquote. I couldn’t find an HTML editor, or someway to get to the actual code of the blockquote. I tried “Remove Formattting” in the Format menu, to no avail. But this isn’t the only bug… just try it out and tell me if you get any of the formatting to work correctly in conjunction with another one within a short period of time (it’s slow from time to time).
The shortcut keys are completely different from Ecto or MarsEdit, which I grew accustomed to quickly as it made sense. Cmd + s, which you’d think would be for saving a post as a draft, doesn’t do anything (To save a draft, it’s actually cmd + shift + s… Why?) , and cmd + Enter is used for posting (It’s shift + cmd + d for Ecto3 and MarsEdit, and just cmd + d for Ecto2).
Also, startup was kinda slow. Cut the unnecessary transitions. I’m opening up a blogging app to freaking write, not to watch the cutesy Blogo rabbit icon pop up.
Where’s the MarkDown support? Where do I go to turn on the HTML when I need it?
Ecto and MarsEdit provides a little javascript link to add to your browser’s favorites bar when you want to blog that page, but Blogo does not. It’s a little feature that is missing.
One last thing: I know I haven’t purchased it yet. Stop reminding me every freaking time I open the application. Ecto doesn’t do it, nor does MarsEdit.
Pros
Admits all these problems, I found the image editing to be fairly useful.
If you notice on that screenshot, there’s the “dropbox” region. You just drag and drop an image there, and this pops up.
Yeap, I’m using the buggy screenshot image, so don’t be tricked.
You can crop by selecting a part of the image. To my knowledge, Ecto nor MarsEdit has this feature. I feel like using fewer apps is the way to go, and by having a very light image editor for cropping or adding a filter (black and white or sepia) is awesome. The fact that you can also give it a specific size is good, also.
But the bad: It doesn’t actually show you what the image is after you include it into the post. You just get this grey box with a camera icon in the middle. Meh.
A handy, UI-space saving feature was the tags/categories bar. I could just start tags (it would know the tags of my few most recent posts) as well as show me what categories I have after I typed “#”. Really nifty and cool. Different from all the other apps, to say the least.
The preview could be amazing. It’s nice that it pulls the CSS data from the live blog, and fits it into the preview (which Ecto or MarsEdit does not do), but it’s not really a live preview: It’s refreshing the page with the content every x seconds, where x is the number you set. It feels a little kludgey.
Verdict
In the end, I was extremely disappointed with the bugginess and the general lack of features. Although, if it was polished up, and the price decreased from $25, I can see the average joe blogger enjoying this Mac desktop app. I’m actually enjoying MarsEdit a lot more… but that’s another post.
EDIT: Ben Jackson actually found me on Twitter and told me to give the next beta version a try. I still don’t find it 100% ready for prime time. Although there is now an HTML view, I was able to find inconsistencies in the posts that Ecto and MarsEdit were pulling down from my website flawlessly. The general bugginess that pervaded this app just didn’t make me want to review it in full a second time. Sorry Ben, I gotta focus on finishing up my review of the other two Mac blogging apps. I have subscribed to your blog, though. Anything Cocoa and Ruby gets a thumbs up in my book, heh.
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