OK, I misread the info on NetNewsWire 2.0 and assumed that the blog editor was “broken” rather than “broken out”. So this is what it’s broken out into: MarsEdit.
The overall appearance of MarsEdit is nice. However it hasn’t imported my blog categories, and I’m not sure how to get them in. I’ll see what happens when I upload this.
Also the Format option only seems to offer None – will it convert line breaks to paragraphs, which is my preferred style? I like the option to use either style for italics – i or em – although I was surprised to find it in a submenu at the bottom of the HTML menu, rather than in Preferences.
Having the MarsEdit Add Link up in the HTML Tags menu really sucks – 90% of my blogs entries involve banging out a bunch of text with a few links in, and I’d like the Add Link to be on the toolbar. Also I’d like the Edit menu to support Paste and Paste as quotation, as in Mail.app.
The XML-RPC Console is a really useful idea. Of course you should never need to use it – except for the situation when nothing else will do….
Highlighting text and hitting cmd-B for bold or cmd-I for italics is nice – but why not cmd-U for underline?
[Updated] OK, that first post looked awful. But after I hit Refresh (how obvious is that?) I pulled in a bunch of recent posts, and it populated my Categories and allowed Convert Line Breaks. Hint: perhaps force a Refresh first time out? And who would know that to set the properties and defaults for a blog you had to double-click the blog in the Weblogs drawer with apparently no menu alternative?
[Updated] That fixed the paragraphs.
The blog entry editing window is a bit schizophrenic. If it really wants to be like mail or word processing, I want formatting items on the toolbar. And the section of the toolbar that includes the Weblog: menu and the Body|Extended… stuff is just clutter. I imagine if I had multiple blogs I could refresh the entries in one, double click a specific entry, select a different blog, and post it. Blog-to-blog cut’n’paste. Cute, but useless to all but 5% of us. An option to hide that stuff would be good, and would free up space for formatting options.
Let’s try inserting a picture. Again, that’s on the HTML menu rather than the toolbar. The New dialog is nice; the Previous one is odd, and didn’t seem to work – perhaps it only shows images that you’ve previously uploaded with MarsEdit. But neither of these lets me link to a third party image, as far as I can see.
[Updated] On the image question; it’s a shame to lose the cool MovableType feature of creating a thumbnail linked to a popup image.
Overall this feels nice – a bit smoother than Ecto. More expensive, of course.