I’ve always been happy enough using the in-built editors in most blogging apps I’ve used. Typo is the one I’ve stuck with for longest (and thus used most), particularly because I like it’s ability to give you a live preview of your post which appears alongside your markup, making for a very nice editing interface.
However, part of my being a ThoughtWorker now involves me traveling and staying in hotels, and I’ve occasionally found myself without an Internet connection and unable to use the online web-based editor.
Of course, on a couple of these occasions I’ve started editing with Word (on my company issue Windows laptop), or Pages on my PowerBook. However, when doing that I tend to miss formatting errors and there’s also something mental – I always end up leaving the posts on my hard drive rather than posted, as I tend to forget to revise and edit further, and just consign them to the ‘no longer relevant’ category. Mind you, perhaps that’s a good thing? :)
So, I plunked down the £14ish for MarsEdit (having read good things about it, and other people mentioning they use it). You’re currently looking at the first post from it, which, ironically I’m writing because in my hotel room I can’t pick up a Wi-Fi signal – but I can do that in the bar downstairs :)
So far, it seems pretty good value – simple, and seems to be designed for it’s purpose (which is why I also love NewsFire, indeed I purchased it over NetNewsWire because of it’s simplicity for purpose). So, here’s my thoughts so far:
Good Points
- Simple purposeful design, it’s not mixing metaphors and trying to do too much. It shows me posts I’ve made, and let me view them, and also see draft posts as I write them.
- Live preview of markdown formatted post is very helpful. It’s much snappier writing posts inside a local app than via. the web interface.
- The fact that I’m writing draft posts, rather than writing posts in documents, should (hopefully) mean I’m more inclined to post rather than just let stuff sit around on the hard disk.
- It’s preview is much easier to see, so I find myself using it more as a place to review and revise my post, far more so than the live preview in Typo.
Improvements
- I’m not so keen on the separate window for the preview. I’d prefer to see it perhaps as a separate drawer, or another pane on the right side of this editing window. It just feels that’s how it should be.
- Why can I insert HTML tags or Custom tags, but there are no tags for the formatting I specify? Would be nicer to set the formatting on the post (rather than the preview), and then have a local markup language reference.
- Let me save a draft to the server. In the same way I can write a draft using Mail and it saves it to my drafts folder (so i can come back to it on another client later), so when revising a draft I can do it without having to always using MarsEdit. I’m not sure whether this is a limitation of MarsEdit in particular, or whether blog editor clients just can’t do that kinda thing?
Things I’m currently not sure of
- Is it possible to enter tags for my posts via this editor? I can select categories through the options drawer, but I’m not so sure how tags get in there. Maybe I should check out the Typo code to see.
- It does include the ability to set an HTML template for the preview which looks pretty nice, so I can style my preview as I would the real post. Not sure how much I’ll use it (I like the clean layout as-is, just with regular headings, bullet points etc.), but maybe in the future.
- Custom Tags lets me enter markup fragments that get inserted into my post. Although this makes it short-handish, would be even nicer if these had short-cuts I could assign. It’s a bit of a pain having to use the mouse to navigate and take my focus out of my writing.
Conclusion
So far I’d say it’s proving to do everything I want it to do, and in a pretty nice way. Hopefully it’ll prove it’s worth and I’ll get back into some posting again, I’m really enjoying doing some interesting stuff with my current ThoughtWorks project.