RSS readers and desktop blogging tools are the two kinds of applications I try out quite frequently, so I’m always happy when I see new products on the market from either category. It is not necessarily an issue of not being satisfied with what I am currently using1 insomuch as curiosity and wanting to see how people tackle old ideas and try to rethink them and bring better solutions.
Blogo is a relatively new Mac desktop blogging software application from Brainjuice. It has support for all the major platforms and set-up was a breeze for WordPress. The interface is just the way I like it — minimal and out of your way. I really recommend taking a look at the screenshots on Brainjuice’s site to get a good feel for it.
Unfortunately, you can tell that Blogo is the newer kid on the block. Without trying to be negative, there are a few things just jumping out at you when you try the program, making you want to wait for version 1.2.
First, the time it took the program to load on my MacBook Pro was unacceptable. I counted 86 bounces in the dock as it was starting up, which is more than any application I have ever opened on this system. Ever. Blogo will not work without an Internet connection, which I hope is merely a limitation of the trial, as it complains about not being able to verify the trial information. If the same thing happens when the application has been paid for and licensed, I would say do not bother with it at all. I use desktop clients almost exclusively when I do not have an Internet connection, and if I cannot start it up2, why pay for it? Maybe some other people simply do not like the admin interface of their respective platform, but I think offline writing would still be a pretty big deal with this kind of software.
The interface, again, is superb as far as I’m concerned, but it does not entirely save the application. There are almost no text labels to see, so everything is visual, which, while it might take a quick mouse hover and tooltip to understand, will have the user respond much more quickly to controls. The icons are pretty intuitive anyway so it should not be hard to pick it up and just get to work. The fullscreen mode is useful for certain kinds of posts, but depending on the kind of blog you have, you might settle for the windowed view to be able to quickly parse links and quotations. I wrote most of this post in full screen, but I was reviewing the application itself, so it was a rare case where it made sense.
The text entry area does not have the Mac OS X system-wide spell checker enabled by default, which is quite surprising, almost making me think it was not available. This kind of integration should be de-facto for any application that involves heavy writing, so I do not understand why it was disabled.
The <!--more--> tag used in WordPress to split the post is represented by three pound (#) signs3, which is not immediately obvious nor necessarily safe. I did not find any obvious way of switching to code view, which will definitely disappoint some of the more power-users out there, myself included.
I have not tried media support extensively. Looking at my previous post, Blogo did not import any text, only the picture. Other posts were properly brought in, and displaying media items in a list is probably a good idea, though the body of the post does not render them4. If you tend to use a lot of pictures, this might be a bit distracting.
The post preview was also very, very slow. Brainjuice says that Blogo will actually look at a real blog post, to give you a proper preview, unlike other blogging clients that will usually use a simple preview template. While it is true that Blogo did fetch my blog layout and rendered an actual preview, it seems it does that every time you hit preview, which is both overkill and an issue of usability. Not to mention the fact that it looks like crap if you are not connected to the Internet. I would think that just caching the blog layout at start-up and using that would be enough, and if none is available, a fallback preview scheme (or maybe the previous layout, if one exists) could be used. Twitter Tools did actually help me identify the fact that Blogo posts the entry to your blog and then shows you the post as a preview. Not the best idea.
One thing that I was going to consider a flaw but found myself liking it is the “save as draft” functionality. While it saves the draft to your blog, it also displays it in the sidebar of the “Edit” view. Quite a good choice, in my opinion, since I have found myself saving local drafts of posts and wishing to be able to save them online. You never know where you are when inspiration hits, and if it is at work, far away from your trusty computer… so be it! No multiple local drafts though, which could be a problem for some people. Growl integration for the draft upload could actually use the draft name, if one exists, instead of just a notice, but maybe I’m just nitpicking at this point. I guess once multiple local drafts will be supported, so will a better Growl alert come.
However: Blogo’s FAQ page shows that the developers are quite aware of these issues, and future versions will have most of the things I have written about. Which is great to hear and I will definitely pay close attention to its development.
As a quick note, the Twitter client is quite nice, having tabs for the various types of messages and making Twitter feel even more like the microblogging service that it is. I do not see myself switching away from Twitterrific anytime soon because of its unobtrusiveness and great hotkey support, but Blogo is a worthy alternative.
In conclusion, I want Blogo to improve, because I could see myself using it more. But, the $5 extra that MarsEdit costs you gives miles and miles of extra functionality that Blogo, with its better interface, cannot yet offset. It seems to be thought out with a certain blogging workflow in mind, one that does not work for me and, I suppose, would work even less for most of the ‘professional bloggers’ out there. I will keep watching its development and hope the issues listed above — and in their FAQ — get addressed quickly.
