![]() The main window lists entries, in four columns, by default: title, weblog, date, and category. Resorting to an e-mail model, additionally, means that you can easily access multiple past entries and drafts, each in its own window. But, of course, word processing doesn’t ordinarily include titles independent of file names or writing in markup. E-mail is, after all, one of two major document models the other is word processing documents. But I’ve been persuaded that Brent is correct here. So, yes, I know, I panned PulpFiction last month for relying too heavily on an e-mail metaphor. Between Ecto and MarsEdit, though, the future is clearly in document-based weblog editing. Sure, if you had a Radio blog, you had a document-based application-but the huge proliferation of blogs, as Maciej Ceglowski demonstrated in the NITLE Weblog Census, means that most people use Movable Type (about 44,000) or the big hosted services, BlogSpot and LiveJournal (707,690), all of which now support some form of remote posting. I used the original Windows LiveJournal client, which was modal way back when, and there weren’t a lot of alternatives. That’s MarsEdit’s schtick.Ī brief historical diversion, if you will: going all the way back to LiveJournal clients, weblog editing clients have tended to be non-document-based, until quite recently. But when he decided that he wanted to split out the weblog editor, he settled on a document-based application made to look like an e-mail client. (For one thing, it was originally intended to be an outliner.) NetNewsWire 1.x has a weblog editor built in, and it was always a bit feature-anemic, so I stuck with Userspace for a long time. I’m an ex-Userspace user, and I’ve become a convert.īrent Simmons, who is exactly half of Ranchero, recently laid out what he did when he started writing MarsEdit. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but so far, MarsEdit is the best of the breed-all two clients that are still under development. That just one more thing is MarsEdit, an editing application for weblogs, and a could-be iPod-like “just one more thing.” (In technical terms, MarsEdit is a Blogger XML-RPC API client.) Weblog editors are the answer to the question, “Do I really have to write posts in my Web browser?” They vary greatly in interface, from the now-defunct Userspace to Ecto, but all seem to share the same basic features: post to almost any weblog system with XML-RPC support, preview an entry, avoid writing HTML, upload files, and integrate with Web browsers and RSS readers, so you can easily blog an RSS item. In retrospect, it’s as if I left Steve Jobs’ 2001 Macworld New York keynote speech right before “Oh, and just one more thing….” Somehow, in the days immediately following the release of a public beta for NetNewsWire (ATPM review), Ranchero Software’s RSS reader ( background here), I missed out on another part of the announcement. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3, and an XML-RPC API-compatible weblog (Blogger, Blosxom, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Radio, TypePad, WordPress, etc.) ![]() Price: $25, $40 with NetNewsWire 2.0 beta, free with registered NetNewsWire 1.x
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