This is about month 5 for me using a Macbook Pro as my personal laptop and I really can't describe how much I enjoy it. I still have to carry around a Dell that's owned by one of my clients as it's my only way to connect to their network to perform work. Occasionally I carry the Dell that my office provided me as well. Yes -- that's right. Sometimes I'm using up three security bins at the airport just for the hardware.
For the most part I've found that the mac-equivalent applications are as good, if not better, than their Windows counterpart -- with two glaring exception.
Microsoft still has the absolute corner on the business worker productivity tools, i.e. Microsoft Office. The Microsoft Office for the Mac is pure shite on a stick and iWork just doesn't have the same level of features. That's all content for another blog at a later date though.
What I've really needed recently is a decent blogging tool for OSX. I came to really love Microsoft's LiveWriter application. It's easy to use, has a beautiful WYSIWYG editor, is compatible with tons of blogging APIs and has a beautiful plug-in architecture for creating add-ins.
Previously I had been using VMWare's Fusion to present the LiveWriter application in the OSX UI but my recent switch to an SSD has forced me to live with a reduced number of VM images on my Mac. Right now I've got two development images that really require me to keep them clean for testing purposes.
So off I go to Google.com to "Bing" blog writing applications for the Mac :) The result? a handful of either Open Source or lightly licensed applications.
The app fired right up and was able to immediately recognize my Blog's API including creating a dummy post so previews could be shown with my blog's theme and styling.
That's where the fun really ended. Blogo doesn't support sending images via FTP as is required by some APIs, the editor is wholly sub-par, and it's handling of inline images is juvenile at best.
Sure inserting code-snippets and formatting them properly can be done by directly editing your post in the HTML view but if I wanted to hack around with HTML I'd be using TextMate to write my posts and uploading them to my server.
What Blogo does provide it does well. The user experience is good and the interface is easy to understand and well laid out.
I decided to give it a test go and post the old standby "Lorem Ipsum" post. It didn't happen! Copying and pasting the text from Firefox resulted in a bunch of garbage being pasted into the editor. Trying this same procedure in Safari did work though; but FF is my browser of choice.
I'm sitting in my Hotel room right now typing this entry up in Blogo and I can confidently say that it will be my last entry posted with this utility. I'll find a way to get a small Windows VM crammed into my SSD if this is as good as blogging on the Mac gets.
Off to sleep now - I'll give another app a try tomorrow. Same Bat Channel; Same Bad Place.
Tata from Burlington, VT.