The past few days have been a very critical time for my blogging experience. I have been trying different blog clients for Mac, and I was slowly, albeit surely, coming to the conclusion that there is no good blogging client for Mac. On my Windows 7 PC, I used to blog with Microsoft Windows Live Writer. It actually downloaded my WordPress blog theme and let me type as if I was writing on the blog itself. It could add annotations, had plugins to provide Wikipedia quick-links, and in short, anything I would have wanted from a blog client. So, when I started my search, the standard was set pretty high.
Here is a list of all the different applications I’ve tried on my Mac:
- Ecto: didn’t even come close to satisfying me. The WYSIWYG editor was buggy and annoying. And I really didn’t like the UI.
- Qumana: Didn’t support online drafting, had no way of inserting multi-media content, and didn’t provide a friendly user-interface.
- MacJournal: didn’t do me much good, as a blogging client. As a replacement for my note collector software (OneNote on Windows) it did great. But it’s lack of support for correct media uploading left me disappointed. Sure, I could configure FTP access for my website, but that would have required tweaking the user permission settings from the server side and I wasn’t going for that.
- Blogo: it was great. Except it didn’t allow me see or edit WordPress pages. Also I had some problems uploading. The UI was awesome. I particularly loved the Fullscreen view which allowed me to write without being distracted by everything else.
- MarsEdit: MarsEdit wasn’t that much better than Blogo; but it currently is my editor of choice. It allows me to do most of the things I used to do with Windows Live Writer and the UI isn’t bad. There are currently no uploading problems and the spellcheck works just fine. It also has a Preview option, much like Windows Live Writer.
Well, that’s it for now. I hope by reading this you can save some wear and tear – and some bucks of course :-).