Having switched to the Mac, I find myself in need of a replacement for the very good Windows Live Writer. The first program I tried was Ecto, and I could not dig it. The interface was clunky, it didn’t offer any sort of decent preview automatically, and I generally didn’t like it.
After Ecto, I tried using TextMate to create and post blog entries. Basically, that’s not what the application is for — it’s an editor. So the handshaking and interaction felt contrived and basically it was a demo of how crazy a bundle can get in TextMate. In short, it wasn’t happening.
Now I’m trying MarsEdit — the new version 2 has been released. So far it seems to have a practical user interface that I can appreciate. I’ll continue to work with it for the next week to see how it works out. At this point, it feels good. I only hope that it can continue to impress or I’ll be searching again…
September 30th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Glad you weren’t immediately turned off by MarsEdit
Let me know if you run into any major problems. The biggest difference coming from WLW is you don’t have a “WYSIWYG” editor mode. It’s something I’d like to add but so far I’ve focused on other priorities.
October 1st, 2007 at 2:21 pm
So far, so good. I’m going to give it a solid run through this weekend at the ALT.NET conference, so we’ll see how it does with the Flickr integration. If that turns out to be solid, I’m sure I’ll be sending a payment your way.
October 1st, 2007 at 7:30 pm
How about the Scribefire extension for Firefox?
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:43 am
RE: ScribeFire
I just finished checking it out. Unfortunately, FireFox on OSX is pretty lame. The text formatting never looks right and a lot of rendering in the engine is broken compared to the Windows version. Camino is better, but doesn’t support the extensibility model of FireFox. So far, MarsEdit seems to work pretty well and I managed to create a quick template for my post width/colors/fonts to use as a preview without too much trouble.