MarsEdit - for WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, etc. App Reviews

PLEASE ADD FEATURED IMAGE FROM WORDPRESS!!! I can only use 3/4ths of what i can do online for free. Please add the extra wordpress features. Could be great!!!

Running my WordPress blog wouldnt be nearly as enjoyable without MarsEdit. The bookmarklet allows me to quickly format linked-list posts. The preview feature is excellent -- posts show up exactly as they would on my blog. I love being able to quickly add custom slugs to my posts, Not to mention, the customer support is excellent. The developer tracked me down through Twitter and personally helped me add custom Multi-Markdown features within a matter of minutes. Excellent app. A staple for bloggers.

Im only a day into using MarsEdit, but I am struggling to get some basic formatting when adding images. For example, with a floating image, to enable some padding space between the text that flows next to the image. Looks like I have to tweak it in raw HTML. The program is stable and reliable, connects easily to Wordpress. The email inbox look and feel makes it easy to manage entries.

After having used this product about a year ago (very heavily for a couple WordPress sites) I unfortunately re-purchased through the app store so I could get automatic upgrades. This software is a huge "your mileage may vary". On at least two of my sites the posting partially works resulting in a jumble of HTML code. A quick search of the support web site reveals mostly shrugs and explanations that they cant support all themes. Further digging uncovers that theres a bug which requires a server patch in order to make the product work. While this is fine for those with easy access to a server upgrade - most hosts arent going to start patching their system at your request. If you are going to consider paying money for this product based on past reputation - Id strongly recommend a free trial first to be sure its going to work on your web site. This product was a HUGE letdown to me as I remember it working flawlessly in the past.

It functions as advertised and works fine for posting blog entries, but at this price I expected much more powerful and more usable editing tools. Why, for instance, is there not a formatting toolbar available with icons for easily formatting highlighted text? Every web-based editor has a formatting toolbar, so why doesnt a native app have one? Why make me pull down a gigantic "Format" dropdown menu when all I want to do is add a hyperlink or italicize some text? And there are also advanced blogging features that remain unsupported. For instance, why cant I designate an image in a Wordpress post as a "featured image"? I feel like I spent $39 on something whose functionality really only deserves, say, $5.

If you manage a couple of blogs or sites this is the application you want, even if you only manage blog it is still very useful. I love MarsEdit. Great support also! I have a Tumblr and a Movable Type blog and it is fast and efficient!

Its certainly not cheap but if youre even remotely serious about blogging, buy it. Its great.

Bought this based on raving reviews. However this app is simple but expensive! Worth $10 not $40

This is a decent application, its reasonably well designed and stable. However, because it doesnt allow you to specify a featured image, it is incompatbile with most modern WordPress themes. If youre not using WordPress, or your theme doesnt require a featured image, youll probably be happy with this application, but make sure you check your theme first. I also think the user experience around images in general could be improved-- its busy and complicated, and needs to be simplified.

I think they have finally nailed it. I was disappointed last year when I tried it. I thought it was only marginal at best. Now it is way better, and I am able to manage our blog network fairly well, copying and changing posts between the different sites with ease. Beats logging into all the different sites.

I love MarsEdit and have used it for years on my blog. It does everything I want it to do, is fast, intuitive and reliable. It stays out of my way when Im not blogging but is easy to bring up quickly when I have a few thoughts to jot down before returning to work quickly. The easy-to-install bookmarklet makes it simple to post URLs to prospective posts and save them as drafts when I see web pages I might want to blog about later. Installing image files and video into blog posts is simple. I saw another commenter say he could not resize images on MarsEdit. This is not true; it is simple to do so and simple to make them appear on the right, left or centered. Previously-used images as well as any you might want for the future are kept in a folder that is very convenient as well. I post on several blogs on a variety of platforms (presently on Blogger and Squarespace) and MarsEdit works perfectly for each with minimal set-up time. One of the blogs is a group blog I run, and Mars Edit lets me easily download all or a set number of posts by my co-bloggers or just my own as I wish (I find this useful for editing my co-bloggers, who for some reason love to add an inch or two of white space to the ends of their posts. With MarsEdit, it is easy for me to download their posts, remove the extra white space quickly, and upload all the posts again without much hassle or time investment.). On the rare occasion when my machine crashed or lost power while I had a post half-drafted, the software always saved the full post, even if I hadnt formally saved it as a draft yet. Red Sweater is also extremely receptive to questions. I rarely have one, because the software works well, but when I do (e.g., I just checked to make sure MarsEdit works on Mac OS Mountain Lion before I upgrade, which it does) the Red Sweater website has the answers and the owner answers himself. Red Sweater also lets you put a copy of MarsEdit on every machine you personally use for the price of one license. Because I like the software so much, the last time I bought a new computer I bought a new copy anyway, just to support the software. Imagine my surprise when I sent a note to Red Sweater telling them this and I got a personal note of thanks from the owner. Ive been using Macs for 27 years now and never had a personal thank-you note from a software developer before. I dont think it has ever crashed on my machines. MarsEdit works great. Bottom line.

"Fixed a bug from 3.5.8 that disabled draft support from Squarespace 5." No it didnt.

I was on the fence about whether to buy this software. I own a small business and I have a blog I post to 1-2x a week. Im so glad I took the plunge and bought this program. It makes blogging so much faster and easier. Ive used it for about six weeks and now I dont know how I ever managed without it. Fantastic app if you blog with any regularity. It was worth every penny.

What a waste! I was never able to post anything because it kept asking for my password. I even tried crreating another blog. Same thing. $40 wasted.

It’s ok; meh. More formatting features would be appreciated - Having the format selection as a drop-down on the far right hand sidfe of the screen is ludicrous. No support for code formatting. Inserting links is cumbursome; Needs a UI lift…

Windows LiveWriter is the best blogging software I have ever used and this is not as good as that. This is the best thing on Mac OSX, which I find hard to believe. Really? No one has written anything to compare to LiveWriter on Mac yet? What is up with all the windows popping up all over the place? Keep it simple!

Still the best OS X for running a Wordpress blog. I have been using it for years and just love it.

Simply the best blogging software available for OS X.

Thanks for this app! Works great with Blogger and hasn’t caused me any problems.

I regret purchasing this program. For the price, I expected something much more feature rich, but this is sorely lacking. The description compares itself to Microsoft Live Writer, which I enjoyed using on the Windows side. They say it “differs in some ways”, but this is *much* less capable than Live Writer. It’s less capable than even Word’s blogging feature set (available only on Windows), which is remarkably robust. There’s no comparison between the apps. What sorts of things are lacking? First, we bloggers use a program like this to help us create deal with the HTML in addition to using an native client. This is native, but it’s HTML features are very weak. The user has to manually create new formatting options under the monolithic “Format” dropdown button if they want quick access. It has built in paragraph, header, italic, blockquote, and link tags and then some alignment options. **That’s it**. Where is horizontal rule? Where are tables? Where are footnotes? Especially for the last two, writing the HTML out for those is a real chore, which this app has no interest in alleviating. And the image functionality is similarly weak. At best, you can resize and image when inserting it, but that’s your only chance. There’s no formatting options once it’s been inserted. The primary formatting options are also very weak. You can add alt text, but there’s no place for captions. There are no other image transformations or other features that actually help bloggers do things that they couldn’t already do in the web client. And that’s the final part that just does it for me. What’s the reason for this app? For the price, it should help us do things that the various web clients don’t, but it doesn’t. In fact, it’s missing features that even the web clients have. And before you say “Than use an external editor!” I’d remind you: this is a native editor that costs ~$40. To buy this and something like BBEdit together is a serious amount of money. It claims that it’s better than web interfaces, but it simply isn’t. Beyond disappointing.