Disappointed

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.

WellSalted about MarsEdit - for WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, etc.