Desktop blogging client for the Mac

Posted November 10, 2007 in Mac, Windows

After trying out Windows Live Writer on Windows, I thought I’d try out some desktop blogging clients for my Mac. Call me old-fashioned, but I like desktop apps. After all your web browser is a desktop app too.

I tried out Ecto, MarsEdit, MacJournal and Qumana.

All of them are pretty cheap (under $50) and Qumana, like Windows Live Writer, is free (but not GPL or open source).

Ecto, MarsEdit and MacJournal all worked out how to extract the blog settings from my blog directly. Qumana struggled with this and it didn’t work until I told it to use the MovableType API that Wordpress supports and gave it the API endpoint (http://erngui.com/blog/xmlrpc.php in my case) rather than just the blog url. This almost stopped me from using Qumana.

MarsEdit is the only one out of the three that allowed me to add new categories for my blog entries, which is handy when you still haven’t worked out the full set of categories for your posts.

The thing I didn’t like in MarsEdit is the apparent lack of WYSIWYG editing.

MacJournal doesn’t allow to add new categories, but the combination of password-protected local journal, with blogging support and nice export to RTF, and HTML (with user-defined templates), sounds very close to what I’ve been looking for.

I think I’ll give MacJournal a good spin over this trial period.