I must say, I love the way things have been going with ecto, the most powerful desktop blogging tool on the planet. Adriaan Tijsseling is the ultimate creative, hard-working programmer.
His latest is major support for Automator actions. He's got a ton of them and I applaud the effort. Excellent decision because it strengthens ecto's hand as the geek's choice for blogging. And, it doesn't hurt user friendliness one bit for the non-geek.
ecto has moved out in front of Marsedit again. For me, that means Marsedit will be sitting in the dock neglected but not too far away if I need it.
Another cool thing with ecto is Adriaan's implementation of tagging. He's got it going. He grabs your tags from del.icio.us and Flickr and shows them in a handy side bar as an option to showing your categories. Also, if you have your focus in the tags sub-area, you can start typing and it will go to an existing tag or create a new one if nothing starts with those letters.
ecto has it's own personality that reflects Adriaan's passion for developing the best possible blogging app. Great stuff!
Another of many examples is the Add Link dialog in ecto. The thing is amazing. Right from the dialog, you can subscribe to the link you are creating with either NetNewsWire or PulpFiction. And you can post the link to del.icio.us!
It would be so easy for Adriaan to settle for making the best possible cross-platform blogging tool -- mostly limiting innovation to areas that work on both Windows and OS X. He so doesn't do this. His work on Automator actions is just one example.
Marsedit lags behind in Mac functionality such as Automator Actions, even though it is a Mac-only app. In a way, Marsedit's role is to take advantage of ecto's bleeding edge work, delivering the *best of ecto* from a minimalist and easy UI point of view. And, I would have to say that the extra time taken on Marsedit does give you more bugfree, stability sometimes. Being the early adopter, though, I love to play in Adriaan's sand box. I have a choice. If I just need to get something out and don't want the bells and whistles, I'll use Marsedit. Otherwise, right now it's ecto.
Technorati Tags: knowledgesharing, blogging, socialsoftware, tagging, Automator, ecto, Macintosh