Blog Client Blues

I spent part of the weekend playing around with three OS X blog clients: Ecto, MarsEdit, and Blogo. None are insanely great.

I want a blog client because I'm lazy; dealing with an online interface is never as easy as a well made desktop application. My criteria for a good blog client are:

• Format text, links, and images without having to write html, but still have the option for trickier scenarios.
• Drag or paste images into a post, crop and format it (think iphoto), and upload it with a button press. If the image is a tiff, it would be nice to have it converted into something less exotic (OS X's clipboard captures images as tiffs).
• Provide the kind of shortcuts that a browser interface can't offer (e.g., pasting a link over a highlighted word and converting the word to a link).

Ecto technically does all of this (minus the tiff bit), but uploads images to flickr and then links to them there. Google seems to want people to use Picsia for blogger images and I'm not clear on why ecto doesn't do this. Ecto's solution is inelegant and clogs flickr with junk. Also, ecto posts had messed up line breaks, but this may be a limitation of blogger's external API.

I want to love MarsEdit because of the simple, well-designed UI, but the editor is strictly html. It's media manager uploads blogger images to Picsia, and integrates with flickr, but pictures need to be cropped externally.

And then there is Blogo. Hopes were high at the start. The UI is thoughtful, and the editor seems very capable, if a little non-standard. But the thing crashed when I hit publish, trashing the post. Bye bye blogo.

I realize the clients are designed to work with many blogging platforms and can't be all things to all users. But it's not as if blogger is exotic and the missing features are corner cases. None of them just work.

For now I'm sticking with the web interface.