ecto is next on the list (it is spelled with a small 'e'). The Application is priced at 19.95 $ and is available over the net, but then again, which application isn't now a days.
How ecto works
Upon launch you are greeted with a wizard style setup dialogue. You begin with entering where you host your blog and then the account details. So far, so good.
You are then greeted with a view of your blog in the not quite logically named "Viewer" window (if you access it through the menu). On top of the window there is a handy toolbar that allows you to create new, publish and delete posts among other things. The panel on the left contains a list of your blogs and the panel on the right is a typical two-panel selector with posts in the top part and a window for viewing selected post at the bottom.
New posts are created by clicking the new button in the tool bar or selecting "new Draft" from the File menu. Editing posts and creating new posts is done in a new window that has the categories to the left, a toolbar with frequently used items on top and a panel for doing the actual blogging to the right. In the panel for blog editing there is a field for labelling the post and another toolbar with formatting options as well as the panel for writing. Once the editing is done the blog can be published with the not quite logically placed "Publish" in the Drafts menu or through the toolbar.
Editing can be done in semi WYSIWYG mode or in HTML mode. The HTML mode is accessible in the editor directly and through the Format menu under the confusingly named "Make HTML Text" option. The mode can be switched back to WYSIWYG by clicking the consistent yet confusingly named "Make Rich Text" in the same menu or directly through the editors toolbar.
My impressions of ecto
My first impression of ecto was that it had a nice clean interface with most features accessible from the tool bars. Writing blog entries was from the outset logical and consistent with my mental model, but then it got less clear.
You work with Drafts in ecto (logical since they haven't been posted yet). But posting is done in the Draft menu. This is logical in one way but different from the other applications I've used. In a way it gives the impression that I am publishing a draft and not a final version. It gets even weirder when I open a published post and I can publish that as a draft. Since many blog systems has a separate options to upload drafts I was unsure what the option was meant to do before I tried it. There is such an option "Save as Draft" but it's located under the file menu and works locally.
There is a import media feature and a insert image feature that probably could have been combined into one. The import media feature works as the media browsers in Apple products, whereas the Insert image feature works by letting you pick an image from your hard drive and set additional options for it such as class, border, size,etc.
Once the image is uploaded you cannot move if. For if you do it won't be uploaded too Flickr where ecto prefers to store it's images. During my writing of this review I tried over and over again to have the images line up the way I wanted them to but ultimately it was a lost cause.
When you publish a post there is an activity viewer that shows the progress but there is no indication in the main "Viewer" window of what is going on. The first time I tried to publish a post I didn't know if the program was publishing so I clicked the "Publish" button again only to get a dialogue about how it was already busy publishing. Bringing out the activity viewer lets you see what's going on but an indicator in the main window would have been helpful.
There is a preview mode that let's you view your posts before publishing but it is hidden in the menus instead of being accessible in the toolbar.
Overall I can't help but feel that ecto can be a great program and it has many clever features such as the insert image dialogue, it's interface for custom html tags, a plugin interface and the built in html checker. It's a shame that it is buggy and inconsistent to the point were just uploading a post becomes too much work.
This post was NOT created in ecto.
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