I’ve been hearing good things about ecto, a cross-platform blogging client that is the successor to the successful and highly-rated Kung-Log, and I decided to give it a shot. I’m already in new-software-mode after upgrading to Tiger, so I figured I might as well try out other new software while I’m at it.
Initial setup of ecto was a breeze. It recognized my Wordpress account without any problems at all (MarsEdit had troubles with this), and the only thing I had to enter was the xml-rpc link and my username and password. A quick skim through the settings showed that I could customize quite a few different options, but I decided not to mess with that much.
The UI is laid out nicely, but I don’t like the overall look of things that much. Maybe it’s the color scheme or the icon designs, but, to me, it’s not very attractive. I suppose this is a tradeoff for making a cross-platform application. It’s not a completely native OS X application, so it doesn’t really look like one.
In terms of usability, ecto is actually pretty nice. The editor window has a lot of options, but those familiar with blogging terminology can find their way around the UI easily. You can edit in Rich Text mode or as raw HTML. There are options for custom HTML tags (a huge plus for me). And there are buttons to quickly insert content from iPhoto, iTunes, and even Amazon. What’s also nice is a built-in trackback option. There isn’t one in MarsEdit, so, if I want to send trackbacks, I have to use the Wordpress admin panel to do it.
What I found very interesting was the Tags list, which consists of all of my Flickr tags. I didn’t specify a Flickr account for ecto to scan, so I’m not sure how those showed up. A few Technorati tags showed up as well, but, again, I didn’t tell ecto to find them. Regardless of how they got there, I do like having them available to me. Selecting tags in the list automatically inserts Technorati links at the end of the post. This is much more elegant than what I have to do in MarsEdit (manually type keywords, set cursor position in the post, run a script).
[Edit: Silly me. I should've read the website before posting that. Turns out ecto automatically grabs Flickr tags if you've used 1001, which I have. Technorati tags from old posts are also added to the list if you edit them.]
Another nice feature is access to all of your del.icio.us bookmarks from the Create Link assistant. Even though the list is displayed as raw URLs sorted by most recently added, there is an auto-completion facility to make finding the right bookmark much easier. As with MarsEdit, you can also insert links from the clipboard, so you don’t have to go through the assistant.
One thing about MarsEdit that bugs me is that it does not correctly recognize line breaks and paragraph tags in Wordpress posts. When you initially create the post, the breaks are there, but, as soon as you upload it to the server, all of the line breaks disappear. This makes it extremely difficult to edit posts later. ecto doesn’t have the problem at all. Line breaks are preserved no matter what.
So far, my brief experiments with ecto have gone quite well. I really like the features that it offers, all of which do make my blogging experience much nicer. However, I’m not really in love with the UI at all. I suppose I could just turn off the toolbar icons and stick with text-only. At any rate, ecto is a very nice blogging application. I’m not sure if I’m going to shell out cash for it just yet, but I will give is run-through during my trial period.
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