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

MarsEdit is a great tool for writers, whether you publish to a blog or not. I use it to write, store and organize articles and essays and even random thoughts. RedSweater is a great company and member of the Apple ecosystem.

This app really saves me time managing and posting multiple Wordpress blogs in a consistent interface. I can compose blog posts on my laptop even when offline. The developers actively keep it up to date and care about their software.

The best Windows Live Writer alternative I have been used for my Wordpress blog on Mac!

Honestly, this thing was impressive 10 years ago, largely due to a complete lack of competition. But today, with amazingly user-focused Mac blogging solutions like Blogo and its typerwriter-icon-toting imitator, why would you want to suffer MarsEdit? Its like chosing Microsoft Word 2003 over the current version of Pages. Seriously, dont fall for the dubious tagline - move along. Youll thank me later.

I have not regretted buying MarsEdit one bit! This app is worth every penny. It does exactly what it claims to do, and I hear in the podcast (Core Intuition) how much Daniel Jalkut (the developer behind MarsEdit) thinks and talks about it, so I knew ahead of time this was an app that was kept up to date. After all, his show is all about iOS and Mac development. Everything that’s in your Wordpress admin panel when it comes to writing posts is available in MarsEdit. You can set categories, tags, block quotes - the whole nine yards. My favorite feature, which is the reason I went for it in the first place, is that the “Save” function actually works! It saves to “My” hard drive, then if the connection is lost when publishing (which you can do right from MarsEdit), you haven’t lost anything. I found all this out the hard way working right from WordPress (I lost a couple hours of work). That’s when I decided to buy this app. Once again, if you have a blog and you are serious about it, do yourself a favor and get this app. It’s the best out there IMHO.

I tried to write a “blog” back in 1998. Hand editing HTML was a pain, so I never did it again. I have often thought of trying again, but never wanted to spend time fighting a blog system rather than writing. However, I have listened to the Core Intuition podcast for a long time, and have grown to respect the developer’s perspective from the show. I figured I would give it another try, so I bought MarsEdit. It has been wonderfully simple. Upon startup, the app provided a link that helped me create the blog, and then it was super simple to write my first post using the RTF editor. You can edit raw HTML, or markdown, or - as I chose - RTF which is pretty much WYSIWYG. I love the application. Creating the content, and posting it to the blog, was extremely simple. Furthermore, since it is saved locally, I can edit over a long duration, without being online. The icing on the cake, however, is the wonderful support provided by Red Sweater. I received an incredibly helpful response the same day I posted my request. I am very happy with the application, and if I stop blogging this time, it won’t be because of the difficulty of the process because MarsEdit makes the process as simple as typing and then clicking on a button. What could be easier?

It’s 2016 and everything feels a bit 2007ish. The product is awesome but would love to open up a newer UI.

If you do any sort of blogging and don’t have a copy of MarsEdit, you’re doing it wrong. Spend time writing great content and let MarsEdit do the heavy lifting. I’ve been a customer for years and each version, including this one, gets better and better. Its programmability makes formatting a breeze and I don’t have to think about fiddly logins and platform peculiarities. Support great independent developers and give it a try.

I’ll be honest: I’ve abandoned Mars Edit after several years of using it and have gone back to using my browser to write blog posts. What Mars Edit does, it does well. But it could be so much more. If you’re using a theme that is designed around feature images, you’re out of luck because there’s no way to designate a feature image from the app…a work-around is installing a plugin that makes the first image in your post the feature image by default, but what if you don’t want your feature image to be the first photo, or don’t want photos in your post at all? There are other problems as well. Why oh why can you not choose a post format type for Wordpress blogs? That alone forced me to go back to blogging from my browser. And why can’t you go back and forth between rich text editing and HTML editing from within the app rather than having to save a draft of your post and closing it out, going into preferences and changing the editing mode to HTML before reopening the post draft if you want to do something simple like drop in a YouTube embed code? The developers are hamstringing themselves here, because this could be a really, really useful app.

I admit it… I was enticed by the young gobabbles of that other app. It had so much promise. She locked me out of the house and took my wallet and wanted me to promise to pay her a monthly allowance before she’d let me back in. Thankfully, you never never left me MarsEdit. I’ve come to cherish that you are reliable, steadfast, and yes, even though the preview window shows the appearance instead of being right where I type, I admire that you let me look at you raw code. I realize now that I was merely dazzled by illusions. You always publish what I ask you to. I wish that someday you’d let me tinker with my custom posts and fill in my ACF fields. But I can work with it because you are always there, ready to publish regular posts with joy and a smile. Sorry I tried to sneak next door. I’m back to stay now.