After reading Apple Gazette’s fairly positive overview of Blogo 1.2, we decided to give the stand-alone blogging application a try. (We tried out ecto and MarsEdit in the past, and ecto still stands as our victor.) From Blogo‘s screenshots, we were hopeful that the application could seriously stand against ecto, as it looks quite polished, with a nice feature-set and much better-looking UI than ecto, albeit one that could still use some polish.
One of the first things we noticed when we started Blogo up is that after easily adding mendax.org to our list of blogs, Blogo imported a number of recently published posts. While ecto does this also, the key difference is that Blogo imports saved drafts at the top of the list, whereas ecto drops them to the bottom as if they were posted weeks, months, or years ago. The ecto team claims that this is a WordPress issue, but it’s clearly surmountable.
Blogo also has a nice full-screen editing window that can be toggled. This feature makes Blogo great for authors who post longer entries on their respective blogs, or authors who like to keep their desktop free of distractions while writing. Also, Blogo has a nice preview mode for blog posts, which actually generates a template of your site by connecting to the site in question and grabbing the requisite style-sheets and related documents. All in all, were quite impressed with Blogo up to this point.
Sadly, this is where Blogo’s strengths end, for even with a nicer aesthetic to the interface than ecto, our experiences with Blogo went downhill quickly. Firstly, there’s little image manipulation that can be done. While some may argue that margin sizes should be handled by a blog’s style-sheet, we still like the fact that ecto lets one adjust image margins without hacking up the HTML code for a blog post. We also like that after aligning an image to the left or right in ecto, that text is automatically wrapped around the image. In Blogo, the HTML tags inserted didn’t display the word-wrapping well at all, and we couldn’t find a way to fix it without getting down to the raw HTML.
Blogo also doesn’t show a list of tags previously used. While typing a letter brings up a small window of tags starting with that letter, it’s not as simple as visually check-marking the tags you want assigned to a new post. In this respect, ecto’s implementation is better, though Blogo could run with both ideas and make the tag list an optional, detached window (like the comments window it sports).
Before submitting our first test post, we changed the time-stamp to the following day, so as to queue the post for later publishing. Unfortunately, Blogo ignored our preference and published right away, which is a bug that shouldn’t have made it out of beta testing. A similarly annoying bug was noticed during the editing process itself, in which italicizing or bolding text via command-I and command-B, respectively, did not work unless text was selected.
Finally, after publishing a post, we retrieved it with ecto to make changes. Immediately, ecto complained about HTML syntax errors. After fixing them, we took a look at the image we uploaded, and noticed that Blogo automatically changed the left and bottom margins to 10 (the image was right-aligned). It’s silly that Blogo doesn’t let users change this value easily.
All said and done, Blogo is a stand-alone blogging application with promise, though very simple bugs are making it to release, and that’s really unfortunate. As it stands, the application needs more testing, and more refinement, before it can really stand up to ecto or MarsEdit. For $25, Blogo shouldn’t sport a version number of 1.2 with these kinds of shortcomings.
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Thanks for your review. To address some of your concerns…
Images: We are aware that image placement is limited. This is to keep things simple and limit the possibility for messing up the blog layout by placing the image in the middle of a paragraph, which is a common issue with other editors like Live Writer. If you want to place your image at an arbitrary place in the text, you will have to unfortunately get down to the HTML.
Tags: We designed this to minimize the space needed for tags and categories. A list view or another window with a large tag set would eat up screen real-estate.
Margins: We’ll allow for more customization of the margins set by Blogo in a future version as we expand the options for the HTML output by it. We know that it’s still not perfect, valid XHTML, and we will work until we get it right.
Post date problems: This is the first we’ve heard about this, and scheduled posts were tested. Can you reproduce the problem consistently on your blog?
Formatting: We are aware of the formatting issues when no text is selected. This was an unfortunate side-effect of a workaround we had to do for WebKit’s bad behavior when erasing links. We will be fixing it as soon as possible.
Thanks for the responses, Benjamin.
We understand that Blogo tries to keep image placement simple, but users shouldn’t have to deal with raw HTML just to get word-wrapping done right. If my image is so tall that it spans multiple paragraphs, and I have it right-aligned, the text in all affected paragraphs should stay to the left of the image. However, when we tested Blogo, we had difficulty with this, as the affected text often jumped below the image, even if the right-alignment was selected.
In regards to a tag-list in a separate window, users with smaller screen resolutions can simply choose not to display the tag-list. However, for blogs with many tags, authors may find it useful to bring such a list up, else they may forget to add a tag. Trying every letter combination just to see which tags we’ve previously used is simply cumbersome. Not to mention, the screen real-estate issue is moot since most authors only need to see this window once, right before publishing their posts. It’s not like this list needs to be up all the time, as it is in ecto.
In regards to the post-date issue, we’ll have to do some more experimentation, because ecto failed in this regard today also, even though it’s been solid for us in the past. Maybe it’s a problem with the latest version of WordPress, and not something specific to Blogo/ecto. If we learn more about it, we’ll be sure to post about it.
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