OK, we don’t know if it’s Safari 4.0.1 or if it’s WordPress 2.8 or if it’s the active intervention of Satan himself, but we’re having just too darn many occurrences of our hard-slaved-over posts disappear, poof! into the ether lately. Grrrrrr. So we’re going to find out if any of the native clients for WordPress blogging out there are an improvement over the web editor … or, at least, functionally comparable and do not decide to eat our hard-slaved-over posts on a whim. Gobble, gobble. So digging around teh intertubes, looks like this is a comprehensive list of reasonably native appearing desktop OS X blogging clients that claim to get along with WordPress and are being actively supported:
- Blogo, “The blog editor for your Mac”
- ecto, “Publish to almost any blog from your Mac”
- MacJournal, “Journaling… 2009-style”
- MarsEdit 2, “Powerful Blog Publishing For Your Mac”
- myWeblog, “The weblog editor for people with style!”
- Qumana, “Tools for bloggers”
- TextMate, “The Missing Editor for Mac OS X”
Any competitive tools that I may have missed, Dear Readers? And any strong opinions for or against anything on this list for doing, well, exactly the kind of thing that you’re accustomed to seeing here?
UPDATES: Here’s how our tests of the various clients are going went:
Blogo: Not overly impressed at all. Rating: 4/10. Dealbreaker: Image upload FAIL.
ecto: Nicely done indeed. Rating: 8/10. Annoyance: HTML autocorrect kills pasted code formatting.
MacJournal: Wrong tool for the job. Rating: 3/10. Kinda like taking a plush minivan offroading; perhaps you can manage, but why?
MarsEdit 2: Insufficiently convenient. Rating: 6/10. Yes, we want the option to get all geeky with HTML … but we don’t want to have to.
myWeblog: Also insufficiently convenient. Rating: 6/10. With the note that were we ever to get into actually using the CMS features of WordPress, this appears to be the only tool set up to handle pages as well as posts, so it would definitely rate a reexamination at that point.
Qumana: Java apps suck. Rating: 5/10. Although if it wasn’t Java, it would probably win hands down.
TextMate: Requires a clue. Rating: 2/10(DNF). If MacJournal is a plush minivan, then this is a workshop sandrail.
Soooooo, out of our seven challengers, the only one that’s left standing as a possible replacement for “save web client drafts more often” is ecto. Yikes! That’s really not how we expected this to turn out, with the wide popularity of WordPress we’d sort of assumed that aiming at semi-casual users of it like ourselves would be a not insignificant market slice. Of course, since we’ve been at this blogging thing well over a year now and it didn’t occur to us to even look around for one until whatever it is that’s causing the recent editing instabilities annoyed us once too often last week, well there you go then, apparently there actually isn’t a marketable blog client segment lower than “hardcore HTML geek”. But for the one client that made a good showing, we now bestow our Grand Wordpress Blogging Client Trophy For Mid-July 2009 upon ecto 3.0. Congratulations to all the contenders!
