I finally landed with MarsEdit as my preferred method for publishing. But that wasn’t a long-term solution either, because as I began writing longer posts (specifically interviews which contain quite a bit of markup), WordPress’ lack of editing features and tag coloring became a deal breaker. I later moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog and went in and out between the WordPress interface and another popular desktop publisher, ecto.Įven though ecto was full of features, my user experience never seemed to “settle”, so I went back to using the online WordPress interface. That was a clunky publisher to say the least. My first blog started a few years ago with Blogger. Not to say that CMS browser interfaces are the world’s biggest nightmare I have gone back and forth several times… (Have you ever tried posting an update or edit to an article while on Digg’s homepage?) There are no shortcut keys for custom tags, and you’re subject to the speed of your internet connection and availability of your server. All the tags are black and blend right in with all the text (also black). You may not have thought about the fact that when you write a post from your CMS’s “Write a Post” browser interface you are typing into a text field. For starters it is much more than word processors with a “send to weblog” button. To genuinely grasp the solution a desktop publisher offers, you have to think outside your paradigm of what you think a desktop publisher is. Other advantages of desktop publishers include features like storing login and relevant meta info for multiple weblogs, (and multiple CMS platforms) which gives you the ability to publish to several sites from one spot. Let me briefly mention here that MarsEdit tackles the “writing offline issue” like nobody has ever tackled it before with a feature called “Perfect Preview”. I’m in seat 12F next to my wife and a middle aged woman reading some Oprah endorsed romance novel.) (Ironically, I am doing just that right now. The most widely assumed purpose of a desktop publisher is so you can “write your blog posts offline.” Well we all know that you don’t need a desktop publisher to write a blog post while you’re on an airplane. The “problem” sorta fixed itself by default. With the advancement that content management apps and their integrated editors have had over the years – along with the advent of high-speed internet (remember when 14.4k was blazing?) – many people don’t see the need for a desktop publisher. Originally, desktop publishers were developed to fix a problem: The ugly, clunky and sluggish integrated editors that were part of blogging applications such as Blogger and Movable Type. And this is where the desktop publisher, MarsEdit, takes off… These apps provide a solution that is so enjoyable and makes so much sense to the user the app becomes a necessity. And often, the most popular applications of all are those which solve problems that didn’t necessarily need to be solved in the first place. At the very core, the entire point of developing an application is to solve a problem inasmuch as a program fills a need, it succeeds.įurthermore, if an application can not only solve a problem, but help the user enjoy the process, it succeeds even more.
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