I work with several blogs, and I have to tell you that I pretty much hate the native user interface for all of them. I don’t care whether you’re talking about Movable Type, WordPress, or Blogger, the basic UI pretty well reeks.
Under Vista, I had become quite happy with Microsoft’s Live Writer, a solid blogging tool that is especially good at putting images into a blog post and linking to images or video clips in other blogs. My happiness was tempered when one of my blogs changed policies, requiring entries to be edited before they went live. Live Writer couldn’t deal with the blogging platform’s interface in order to post an entry in “draft” mode, so I was back to creating (or at least finalizing) blog posts in the native blog UI.
Since moving to the Macintosh, I’ve discovered Ecto, and it has quickly become one of my favorite programs on the Mac. Not only does it have solid editing tools, it will happily work with the application interface for Movable Type and Wordpress to post in draft mode, set advanced publication times, and insert all sorts of interesting things into a blog post. The user interface is easy, the rich-media features are hardy, and the overall experience is wonderful. I first heard about Ecto, as I hear about so much, from Lifehacker, and their advice has been good on this one.
Now, if I could just figure out a mail program that is as good as Outlook — and far better than Entourage…

Categories: Media, Software