MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software is the last application I'll review in my series on blog publishing applications on Mac OS X. It has a cool icon with a rocketship and the planet Mars and is priced at 29.95 $. The version used in this test is 2.3.2.
How MarsEdit works
When MarsEdit is launched for the first time you are greeted to a wizard pattern dialogue that takes you through the process of setting up a blog. You can either create a new blog or supply information about an existing blog. After passwords and the title of the blog have been set you are all set to start blogging.
The main view in MarsEdit is a three panel selector which lists your blogs on the left, your posts in the top left panel and the selected blog post in the bottom right panel. Common controls such as "New Post", "Delete Post", "Edit Post" and "Media" are conveniently placed in the toolbar on top.
Creating blog posts can only be done in html but there is a preview mode to help you on the way. The toolbar on top has links to html tags in case you forget or just don't fancy typing. On the side is a panel with the categories and at it's bottom you can add new ones.
Images are added through a the Media Manager. MarsEdit stores your pictures on Flickr so you'll need an account there as well. There is a serious limitation in that images cannot be resized from within the program. Instead that has to be done either in the html img tag or in an other program.
Editing html can be a bore and in case you aren't happy with the html tags that come predefined you can always add new ones through the Markup Macros dialogue
My impressions of MarsEdit
MarsEdit is a competent program with some serious drawbacks. I like the clear and logical layout and naming and the stylish icons. It supports pinging sites when you update your blog and the preview mode in combination with the html editing works very well for me. However not everyone has knowledge of html and this will be a big drawback for many people. I would have preferred to have the option to edit in wysiwyg mode as well.
The fact that media can only be added using Flickr is another drawback but not as big as the fact that there is no built in support for resizing images.
Blogger's built in semi wysiwyg html interpreter considers breaks in the html codes the same as actual break tags and I would love to have an option to strip out the breaks before publishing. This is not a problem with MarsEdit however but something that the whizkids at Blogger came up with.
I would not discourage anyone with experience in coding web pages from buying MarsEdit. Just make sure that you know your html before you open your wallet.
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