It has been a week since we at ReviewMe have been posting reviews and news for you. Sometimes it is not possible to write an article in one go. Sometimes there are bits and pieces that you might want to work on. One of the issues faced by us is on this huge iMac 27" screen, the width of the TextBox to enter the text is fixed horizontally and can be expanded only vertically. Being online to edit the post is not that difficult given the always on ADSL/Cable connections, but navigating though the multitude of clicks to get to the blog is not exactly fun.
Some of you that have been involved in development might have heard of Daniel Jalkut or seen tweets from him, his handle is @danielpunkass or his website www.red-sweater.com. From this comes a wonderful gem, a software offering that allows you to work with blogs in a more intuitive way. I guess for me the email interface is one of the basic interface that says User Friendly. Because of the interface, understanding what's happening is easy. On the left hand side is a lot of the blogs and their posts and pages. On the right hand side it is a split window view that enumerates all the posts/pages and t preview pane underneath to display the details.
The magic of MarsEdit is not just the fact that it has this UI, but the fact that adding a new blog account is nearly automated. Enter the Title of your Blog and the URL to the blog, MarsEdit almost self configures itself and asks for the username and password allowing you to add, edit or delete an entry.
Some of the features that are quite useful are that you can create entries offline, so you do not have to upload them to the blog, you can save them locally for uploading later (e-Mail Drafts).
The main reason that MarsEdit came into being was the frustration faced by Daniel when the browser would crash or freeze. I am sure that many of us have faced that and quite often. With MarsEdit, you are working with the local copy and when you upload to the server, it is saved into the draft/published, so it is bit more trustworthy AND you can have an offline copy of all your posts and pages. So if you were to move from a provider to another, it would be easier to just transfer your posts. Though some would prefer exporting an XML from the website of the blog provider containing all the data and importing the XML into the new site. (This process created issues for us, but using MarsEdit it was just smooth)
For the developers who love playing with scripting, MarsEdit can be scripted to include more functionality like inserting the name of the song playing in iTunes, get text statistics, create a new blog from text selected in Safari, and you are free to write your own.
This is one of the best options if you are a blogger using a Mac OS X. If you can think of a situation where you are without an internet connection but would like to write your thoughts or blog, this is the tool that lets you do so and then upload it to the blog site when you have internet connectivity. It is priced at $39.95. For the simple clean interface and the functionality offered that is an amount well spend. After one realises how important a role MarsEdit plays while working with Blogs, one would appreciate it more. Get the trial version to give it a test drive.
One thing that kind of create an issue was in our opinion more blogger related than MarsEdit related, Posts created and neatly formatted in MarsEdit when posted to blogger lose all the nice formatting and turn into a mess. So we start a post from blogger and then continue editing it in MarsEdit.
Summary
Software : Mars Edit
Version : 3.1.5
Publisher : Red Sweater Software LLC
Website : www.red-sweater.com
Twitter : @danielpunkass
Platform : Mac OS X (10.6.x or higher) (Version 2.4.3 works with 10.5)
Demo : 30 days
Price : $39.95
Mac App Store : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marsedit/id402376225?mt=12
And we have a copy of Mars Edit for one lucky winner, all you need to do
1. Follow @whatsin4me
2. Retweet "Read reviewme.oz-apps.com, follow @whatsin4me and RT this msg. You might win a copy of #Mars Edit from @danielpunkass"
3. The winner drawn at random shall be announced on the 25th of January 2011 via twitter
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