MarsEdit Update Kicks Your Blogging Up A Notch
I’m not one to get excited about dot-update releases from a software vendor, but a tool that was mentioned in my “must have” post – MarsEdit – has just updated from version 2.0 to 2.1, with that “0.1″ adding far more than a tenth of new features.
One of my major complaints about the previous version has been the horrendous preview feature. While you could connect MarsEdit up to your site CSS style sheets fairly easily, rendering of your entries was always slow and buggy. The new preview feature is fast, responsive and (so far) bug/crash-free. This makes creating entries more fluid and enables you to trust what you see locally rather than having to preview posts on your site before publishing.
One other great, new feature is the ability to search your posts locally. If you contribute to a number of blogs (public or private) or just post quite a bit, this can be a great way to go back and see if you’ve already hit upon a topic before. It can also be a great way to gather support materials for a new post. Since you can use MarsEdit as a note-taking system (you don’t have to post drafts to a server), this can also be a fantastic way to organize small bits of info you keep promising to find a place for.
Finally – for Movable Type and WordPress users – authors have the ability to do free-tagging instead of picking from a list of defined keywords. I’m a huge Drupal fan, and Drupal does have free-tagging support, so perhaps Dan will read this humble post and work on interfacing with the Drupal API’s.
MarsEdit is not free, but it’s a bargain at $30. Dan is very responsive in the ME forums and both he and the app have a presence on Twitter (when Twitter is actually up, that is).
If you have any good/bad experiences with MarsEdit please drop a note in the comments and if you have alternative blogging client/post organization suggestions let us know as well (always good to hear from those three ecto users out there).
#1 Randy says:I’ve used MacJournal for a while now and it seems to work well. Dan, the developer, is also quite responsive and the latest 4.3 update fixed some of the bugs posting to my wordpress blog. I’ve not tried MarsEdit as I stumbled on to MJ first and am happy enough (plus, don’t want to spend more money for the same thing). But I’m interested in your perspective, Bob, if you’ve had opportunity to use both.
#2 Peter says:Nice review here :
http://shawnblanc.net/2008/marsedit-review/
#3 Ray Marotta says:I use MarsEdit all the time in conjunction with NetNewsWire v3.1.2 beta and totally LOVE IT, Bought both applications and continue to support them whenever new versions come out. Highly recommend Both….
#4 Szilvi says:Bob, since you mentioned Drupal, I have a question for you, and anyone who happens to have experience with Drupal and blogging software. Is it currently possible to create and modify (Drupal) posts with custom fields directly from desktop software?
#5 Jim says:I would love to know if it works at all with Drupal. With ecto you can at least post to your own blog if you have the blog API turned on in Drupal’s settings.
#6 Szilvi says:Jim, MarsEdit works with Drupal. You have to enable blogapi and tell what content types to use it with, and in MarsEdit you type the names of the content types, comma separated I think, into the blog ID field.