Posted on October 1, 2008 - by Jonathan Davies

Review: MarsEdit Publishing From The Desktop

All of the post I write come through one program. MarsEdit. MarsEdit, in my opinion is the premier desktop blog publishing application on the planet. In this review I’m going to be looking at what makes it so good and also appealing to many people.

Background

MarsEdit is developed by Daniel Jalkut, though was previously part of NetNewsWire. However after changing ownership a couple of times it landed in the hands of Red Sweater Software and has gone through it’ 2.0 release and a lot of changes.

It’s used by some of the greats in the blogging world, one of them; Shawn Blanc had this to say in his review of MarsEdit:

I finally landed with MarsEdit as my preferred method for publishing. I think I made a pretty good choice too, because the more I use it the more I feel it’s a Mac app which truly is out of this world. (Get it?)

Writing

Setting up your blog with MarsEdit is laughably simple. You enter the name and URL of your blog and it goes out and pulls down all the information it needs. Then you type in your username and password that you log into and you’re set up. I use Wordpress so I’ll be refering to that, however, Movable Type, Blogger, Drupal and many other blogging platforms are suppported.

The interface for MarsEdit is very simple, like most Mac applications. You have a small amount of buttons along the top varying from “New Post” to the search box, a new feature of the 2.0 release.

However most of the fun starts when you create a new post. There is, in fact no WYSIWYG editor built into MarsEdit. Some would say that this is a flaw, but I think it’s a feature. You don’t have to mess around with any formatting as you jump between views. It’s just simple text and there is nothing that the WordPress interface might not misinterpret as I found it often does when writing posts in their WYSIWYG view.

One problem that I have encountered is that there are just to many pop-up windows. I think that the Media uploader would be better suited as a drop down menu instead of an extra window.

Of course for the less code savvy (if you can call html code) along the top right hand corner there is a drop down menu with some of the more popular code snippets such as blockquotes, h1, h2 etc. Of course you can edit these and ad your own if you find yourself using any particular tag a lot of the time.

All from within the MarsEdit interface you can add tags and categories - change the post status. It is little things like this that sets this app apart.

Conclusions

MarsEdit is a fantastic bit of software let down by a couple of weaknesses in the UI. If you’re running Windows have no fear as Microsoft has Windows Live Writer for you and another WYSIWYG editor on the Mac is Ecto.

MarsEdit can be purchased for $29.95 from Red Sweater Software. There is also a free trial so you can become addicted.