Switched Back to ecto
Posted December 19th, 2007 @ 02:20pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Since shortly after MarsEdit 2.0's release, I switched to using it as my primary blog editor, occasionally substituting only the web interface on my primarily MarsEdit-powered blogs.
However, I grew increasingly annoyed at several of MarsEdit's "issues" and have been using ecto 3.0 betas rather comfortably for well over a month now.
MarsEdit can't handle things like apostrophes in category names. MarsEdit's preview won't put in line breaks for single-line breaks. Its preview pane almost never remembers its scroll position, making editing images or tables or whatnot in a large post a major hassle. MarsEdit still can't post something to a blog as a draft. I also never got much sense that MarsEdit was in very active development - and that's saying something from someone who's switched back to ecto.
The "post as draft" issue is likely a big deal to anyone who uses a blog with both "authors" and "editors," and in the end, it's the straw that broke the camel's back.
P.S. I like a lot of the things MarsEdit did, and dislike a lot of the things ecto does (including the all-too-tiny "status" buttons for comments, trackbacks, and publishing settings). But I'm also excited about ecto 3's plugin architecture and think that it has a lot going for it.
P.P.S. Most of my earlier observations still stand. All except the "slug" bonus and the "relative date" knock, I think.
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Posted 19 Dec 2007 at 2:35pm #
I switched to MarsEdit after I saw what ecto was going to do to the custom tags implementation. going from a nice, functional list to making me pick buttons from *font symbols*? Um..no.
Posted 19 Dec 2007 at 3:13pm #
[quote comment="44997"]I switched to MarsEdit after I saw what ecto was going to do to the custom tags implementation. going from a nice, functional list to making me pick buttons from *font symbols*? Um..no.[/quote]
Indeed, that's one of the more puzzling things about ecto. But I use the keyboard shortcuts all the time. I do wish ecto would enhance the "snippets" functionality to include things like cursor placement or the ability to prompt for things like a title tag in a link or whatnot.
Posted 19 Dec 2007 at 6:57pm #
I'm surprised that you have the impression MarsEdit is not in active development. I guess I have taken my foot off the accelerator a little bit since I released 2.0, but I spent pretty much 6 months sprinting to get that release finished and out the door. As of today we're approaching the 10 month anniversary of my taking over the product. I'd say I'm moving pretty quickly.
I'm not doing public beta releases because I don't want to be judged by and support beta-quality software. I guess this helps give an impression of inactivity. You make some good points about flaws in MarsEdit, but I'm not standing still. 2.1 development is chugging along and it will come out when it's ready. It won't satisfy every item in your wish list, either. But it will be a step in the right direction.