After I asked in my last post about offline blog editors for the Mac, several people responded publicly and privately suggesting I check out MarsEdit, including the developer, Daniel Jalkut, who left this great comment. Naturally, I downloaded and tried it out – and I can see why people are saying great things about it. It’s a great offline editor.

Makes it very simple to edit posts. Easy to use. Lots of macros. Tons of capabilities. Doesn’t do rich text editing like ecto or, on Windows, Windows Live Writer or Semagic, but it’s a solid offline text editor. If you aren’t using an offline editor and you’re on the Mac, I’d definitely encourage you to check MarsEdit out!

Unfortunately, unless I’m seriously missing something, it doesn’t work for me. For one simple reason:

Lack of support for pasting in images.

As readers know, I like to illustrate my posts with images. Specifically, and here’s the challenge – screen captures. However, what I don’t like to do is to save an image to a file, upload it, link to it, etc. That’s too slow. What I want to do is this:

1. Capture a part of the screen, typically either a region, or a window. On Windows I was using TechSmith’s awesome SnagIt program and on the Mac I’m using the built in capture utlity (Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 lets you capture a region or window and put it on your clipboard.

2. Click into the offline blog editor at the appropriate point and simply do a Paste.

Ta da… screen capture inside of blog entry. The blog editor automagically:

1) creates a thumbnail of the image at the location of your cursor;

2) creates a link to the larger image;

3) creates temporary files and filenames for both files; and

4) uploads all the files and creates the correct links when you hit “Publish”.

It’s magical. Drop in images, write your text, hit “Publish”… and you never have to worry about naming the files, uploading them, etc. The key for me also is… it’s FAST. I can just capture and write away.

Now, Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer still does this the best out of all the ones I’ve tried. Semagic also handles it well. And here on the Mac, ecto does it, albeit with the alignment issue that I mentioned in my previous post.

That’s a key requirement that I need to be able to post quickly. If I’m missing something in MarsEdit, I’d love to be clued into that. It seems that I have to save the file first in order to include it.

Having said all this, I should say that MarsEdit does have a VERY cool “Media Manager” component that let’s you easily link to your Flickr stream and also – and this is huge – a “catalog” of the images that you’ve used in your blog (since the time you started blogging with MarsEdit). The Flickr integration is awesome and for any blog entries where I want to use a Flickr photo, it’s a great benefit to be able to just pull in the image.

Likewise, the catalog is incredibly beneficial! Right now, I have all these various different images that I’ve screen captured and inserted into my blog entries. But if I want to link to one of those images again, I have to go find my blog entry where I use the image, right-click it and get the link, and then link to it in my new post… or… and this is usually faster… I have to re-capture the image which then results in more disk space being wasted in my TypePad account because I already have a similar image there. So this image catalog is excellent.

I just wish there was a way to paste in a screen capture! Add that in and I’d probably switch entirely. (This post was written in ecto so that I could include the screen captures.)

Outside of that, I definitely agree that MarsEdit is a great tool. If you don’t do screen captures, it’s a great one for you to consider for offline blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogeditors, blogging, ecto, windowslivewriter, semagic, images, tools

Courtesy of a tip from Neville Hobson, I learned that Scott Kingery at “TechLifeBlogged” has released a version of Windows Live Writer that works off of a USB drive.   As Scott writes:

This past February I posted a launcher for Windows Live Writer so that you can take it with your between computers and retain all your settings. Today I am releasing version 2.0 of the Launcher. Much has changed with Windows Live Writer and I have learned some new techniques for making it portable. This is a much cleaner implementation and it plays better with Windows Vista.

I don’t personally have a real need to be able to do this, but I do think it’s a cool idea.  I like the idea of being able to use WLW on any given machine.  Fun stuff!

As I mentioned recently, it seemed like a new version of Windows Live Writer was imminent, and indeed, on Wednesday Microsoft released Windows Live Writer Beta 3 (I would have written about it then, but I was a wee bit distracted). You could download it from that announcement page for from the main Windows Live Writer page.  Reading Joe Cheng’s blog post about the release, it sounded interesting so of course I downloaded and installed it.

The first annoyance was that it’s now integrated into the full "Windows Live" installer and so when you go to install Windows Live Writer, the installer will also by default install a bunch of other Windows Live apps, ranging from Messenger to Mail to a search Toolbar and a "family safety" option.  Now, you can thankfully de-select all of these options and simply install WLW, but it’s something you have to pay attention to.  I understand Microsoft’s motivation.  They want to make it easy for people to install all  the Live apps, and they see it as a way to "upsell" people on the other apps (which are all free).  Get people hooked on their apps and search versus those of Google.  I do understand… and I can’t really complain because MS is giving us the really incredibly useful Windows Live Writer tool for free.  Still, it was slightly annoying that I had to un-check all those boxes just to get WLW.  (But yes, a small price to pay for WLW.)

The major annoyance, though, was the screen that greeted me when I launched it (once I found it!  My old QuickLaunch icon no longer worked and I had to sort through my Programs menu until I finally found it under the "Windows Live" sub-menu…).  The screen prompted me to start using WLW by adding a weblog! Huh?  What happened to the six weblogs that I already had configured WLW to work with?

Gone.

All the configuration data seems to be gone.  All my weblogs were no longer configured in WLW.  Now, this probably had something to do with the changes to registry locations mentioned in a recent WriterZone blog post.  Still, it was a rather unexpected and definitely annoying outcome of doing what I thought of as an upgrade!  (And yes, I realize it is "Beta 3", but I’m sorry, I would have expected an upgrade to pull across config info.)

Now, the process of adding a weblog is relatively trivial.  Just go to Weblog -> Add Weblog… , fill out the blog URL, username and password, confirm the results and you’re done.  Maybe a minute to do it.  Still… it was an unexpected step to have to take.

The good news is that all my drafts still seem intact (even all those drafts for weblogs which are no longer added to WLW), and the couple of plugins I use seem to still be there… so I seem to be set to go.  Now, maybe I can check out the new features…