Continuing on from my trial of MacJournal Yesterday, I have downloaded MarsEdit as a comparison. My first impressions of MacJournal are not favourable. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by my experience with Windows Live Writer, but the interface and configurability of WLR are so good I’m afraid MacJournal is not good enough.
Things I did not like about MacJournal:
- Multiple blogs – my wife and I both have blogs, and it was not easy to work out how I can configure MacJournal to run two blogs and easily switch between the two. It may be possible but I could not work out how after a few minutes wandering through the interface.
- Images – as a photographer, I am obviously keen to blog around my images. To say the interface for adding images is clunky is an understatement. I could only get an image into my test post by dragging it from an iPhoto window into the draft post. And then, my ability to customise the size, positioning and resolution etc. was extremely limited. Again, there may be a way, but it was far from easy to identify.
So for $40 odd, MacJournal won’t be getting my money.
Anyway, on to MarsEdit. So far so good, the setup process on MarsEdit is good, when I opened it up first time, it configured by blog settings pretty quickly. It even pulled in the posts that I have previously submitted, so it has a good history of my earlier content. I have managed to add both blogs with a minimum of fuss, and as you can see add an image with some degree of configuration.
Having said that, there are still a lot of options that I don’t have when it comes to image configuration. There appears to be no easy way to control parameters like adding a border, allowing or disallowing a click to download, adding a hyperlink to the image, etc.
Furthermore, I like to be able to add a “Click to see more” link so that my main blog page just has an image and a few lines. So far, this too has eluded me.
So if I score McJournal 2/10, I’d score MarsEdit 6/10. At this stage I’m not parting with any money…
Ah welcome to the dark side! What did you go with? iMac? I too have gone back to the Mac after my original iMac ‘died’ by being enticed by the latest Macbook Air which is just a work of art…
I too am trying to find a worthy Mac equiv. of WLR and will download Blogo (http://www.drinkbrainjuice.com/blogo) tonight and give it a go – from the screenshots it looks quite good? Downside again is it isn’t free…
Hi Nick, trying not to sound like a fervent Mac Fanboy, but I bought the 27 inch quad core iMac with the i7 chip. Perhaps there’s another post in that topic, but so far I am pretty pleased bar the WLW issue.
My next test will be Ecto but I am not hopeful given the trouble so far in finding a viable alternative.
And you’re right, they all seem to be paid applications… Anyone else have suggestions?