karl.tsakos.us/blog

Broadcasting From Mars

You know, trying Flock for posting on my blog got me to thinking, I know I’ve heard of blog editors before. I just never payed them much heed as I never needed one before. Until now; I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I now have a blog.

I did some research and came across the program I think I heard of, MarsEdit by Red Sweater Software. As a matter of fact I am writing this very review in a demo copy of the program. What I see so far is pretty nice. I like the interface which is simple and well laid out.

The main window has a list of your blogs on the left as well as a local drafts folder for when you are working off line. Well, not just for working off line, this way you could have several entries you are working on that you want to post only when complete. A nice feature really. On the upper-right is a list of the entries in the selected blog or drafts on the left. Below that list is a preview of the selected blog entry. Along the top of the window is an icon bar which provides several common options such as New Post, Delete Post, and Edit Post

Editing or creating a new post brings up a new edit window. The window is a very straight forward text editor with an interesting twist. Since you are writing content for the web, the program allows embedding of html code, rather standard really. However, if you use a standard key combination for formatting, such as command-b for bold, instead of bolding your text on screen, the html code for bolding text is inserted. There is also a drop-down menu with common web formatting options.

There is also a scripting menu with some handy scripts already available. One I find useful is the Add Paragraph Tags script. For some reason, returns aren’t automatically interpreted as paragraphs in this program or WordPress, so this script does so for you.

Back in the edit window, you can display a pane with options for the blog entry on the right. These options include selecting categories or creating a new one. You can also toggle some of the server options including Commenting and TrackBacks.

While MarsEdit doesn’t have the webclipings feature of Flock, it is well integrated with the clipboard and Safari. I suppose now is as good a time as any to point out the program is Mac only as are all the programs from Red Sweater Software. With that in mind, they are all Universal Binaries, so will work with both Intel and PPC based Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. As noted earlier, there is a 30 day free trial and the software costs $29.95 to purchase.

Already, I like this editor better then Flock’s. Not that there is anything wrong with that editor, just that this one is only an editor and focusses on doing that well. I will most likely purchase this after the 30 days is up unless I come across anything better. As I said, I will probably buy this one.

December 27th, 2007 Posted by Karl | Non-Fiction, Review | one comment