Ever since I switched to OS X myself, I keep an eye out for decent blog editors for the Mac platform.
Most of them suck. One that holds some promise is MarsEdit, which just recently got updated to version 3.0. Surprisingly, it took this long to put in WYSIWYG editing for blog posts, only to limit the editor to the latest OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Most Macs aren’t running 10.6, and I can’t think of any reason why the upgrades to this blog editor would, in any way, require Snow Leopard to operate.
Not only that, but it was said that it took 2.5 years to get the features in 3.0 completed. It appears as if Red Sweater (the developer behind MarsEdit) is a one-man show which may explain this, but this only lends credence to the huge hole when it comes to blog editors on the Mac platform.
The field of blog editors under OS X has sucked ever since I bought my first Mac. It is surprising, too, since so many bloggers use a Mac. So, they’ll either use the built-in interface in their blogging software or they’ll use MarsEdit. How they can sit there and write their posts in HTML code and not complain is beyond me.
In the biggest piece of irony, the absolute best blogging editor out there is Windows Live Writer, by Microsoft. We’ve talked about Live Writer several times on PCMech, but it is simply the best option out there – on any platform.
If Microsoft would port Live Writer over to the Mac platform, they’d clean house. Alas, that’ll likely never happen because Live Writer is part of the Windows Live suite of applications – something Microsoft is highly unlikely to branch off into a completely different operating system.
In the meantime, Mac developers need to look at Live Writer and emulate it. There is nothing complicated about it and, in my opinion, this is a huge hole in what is otherwise one of the great selling points to Mac software – usability and great design.
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