Ecto, the Joi Ito-sponsored successor to Kung Log, is out in 1.0 ("What 'version 1.0' means is that you can now pay real money for it:" $18) and it's not only pretty, it's beautiful. It's one of those crafted OS X UIs that inspire envy in those of us who give Windows our desktops but not our allegiance.
I'm still using Zempt and liking it OK. Between it and briefly trying w.bloggar again, and my new use of Semagic, I notice some things few clients have that would be nice, though:
WYSI-mostly-WYG editing. It's understandable client authors don't want to embed a whole browser engine for editing, but give us a limited set at least. You can show other HTML as normal. I'd be happy if you handled paragraphs, lists, block quotes, links, and em and strong and cite (and, sure, raw bold and italic and underlining; deprecated is different from dead). I can type everything else myself, that's cool.
Mainly I want to see my links at the relative size they'll be when published, instead of taking up two or three lines because you're compelled to show me the URL still. The only reason I want to see something when I'm editing is because I'm editing it, and I didn't typo the URL, honest: I copied and pasted.
Actually, I love how Zempt lets you pick your font then shows HTML in Courier New. It's much easier to discern what's text and what's code. I'd merely like to see this expanded to showing me the difference between code and the simple, common styles.
- Live previewing. This isn't WYSIWYG: I mean the "preview" option should automatically have perfect fidelity (subject to the browser engine, of course). w.bloggar has very restrictive customization on the HTML it uses in preview, and Zempt doesn't seem to let you customize it at all. Even ecto makes you enter that HTML (see also FAQ #4)--but you already entered it once: into the weblog. The "Preview" option should fetch the real template right from the weblog and fill in your content itself. It would be even better to give the draft entry to MT in a preview mode, so it could build the final page itself, including all the plugin etc output (and because even supporting basic tags can get complicated).
The other feature I would like is good support for multiple systems--it should be as good as Zempt for Movable Type weblogs and as good as Semagic for LiveJournals--but that's asking a lot.
Comments
comment
I’m pleased that you like how we handle multiple blog accounts. It wasn’t an easy problem to solve, and we still have some issues to work out, mainly around dealing with draft and edited entries.
Your description of WYSIWYG support is almost exactly like what we are building into Zempt. We aren’t going to do table editing or complex CSS, but bold will be bold, and links will be blue and underlined instead of code.
The problem with live previewing is that you need to be online in order to use it. We have discussed at length setting up a way to let Zempt preview using your text formatting plugins, but we have also put in considerable effort in making Zempt useful while offline. Those two features seem to conflict with each other.
comment
Re WYSIWYG: cool! :)
Yeah, live previewing would necessitate being online. Personally my workflow is such that if I’m writing in something like Zempt, I’m online. Actually, the other clients I’ve used have seemed unreliable enough for offline editing I would probably write in a regular text editor were I offline… but those are the prejudices I brought.
Thanks for the comment!