I had to upgrade a couple of blogs to WordPress 2.0.1 yesterday and another this morning. That activity gave me an opportunity to test yet another desktop weblog editor. I decided to evaluate ecto.
Unlike MarsEdit, ecto also offers a Windows version and the registration fee is a bit less ($17.95 vs. $24.95). Setup for these additional blogs was faster with ecto than yesterday’s work with MarsEdit (the software was able to figure out I had a WordPress blog and seemed to understand the xml-rpc setup right out of the box). ecto also sports some additional features…for example, an iPhoto button for importing images and an Amazon button that enables building a clickable, illustrated link to an item. Let’s test that iPhoto button…
It works. Ecto offers a number of interesting features: a word counter, templates, preview button, quick push-button shift between HTML and “Rich Text” editing and more. Not quite the same cocoa-smooth interface that MarsEdit offers but I think if I can figure out how to do one or two more things with this program, I’ve found my offline editor.
[update]
This is the final test (editing an existing entry and seeing what happens to the post time/date, RSS feeds, and so on) and while I’m at it, I’ll put in a couple more observations about both ecto and MarsEdit. I’m doing this edit via ecto and have decided this is the program I’ll be using.
Where does ecto fail? I don’t like the “busy” look of the interface–far too many buttons, choices, options. A bit more UI engineering would really help (hint to ecto developers: take a look at the latest 1.1 release of MarsEdit). Of course, once you begin working through a few of the options, you realize it is nice that they’re available.
I just registered my copy of ecto. I was about to register MarsEdit yesterday and saw that they had a bundle deal for purchase of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit together. Since I registered NetNewsWire a few months ago, I sent in an email to NewsGator, asking if I could register MarsEdit for the difference in price between NNW and the bundle price. “No, we don’t offer that option,” the NewsGator replied. I could swear I heard the sound of crocodile tears hitting their keyboard 🙂