Blogo is new blogging software for Mac OS X. I used it for a few minutes and I give it the thumbs down. I didn’t like it for the following reasons:

1. Blogo didn’t download my category list and give me a way that I could see to choose a category for my post. This by itself is an instant deal buster. I’m already out. Done. Kaput. And I’m a bit shocked this is missing, frankly.

2. Blogo is not WYSIWYG. It sort of is, but if you’re dealing with a photo, then it inserts a little icon that represents the photo. This is frankly lame. I don’t want a “Preview.” I want to edit the actual post. I understand this is a hard problem to solve. But other people have solved it. If you want to be a player in this space, solve it, and solve it well. Get rid of the edit and preview metaphor. It sucks. It sucks big time.

3. Blogo posted a temporary post to my blog to get the styles of my blog to render an accurate preview. It then failed to delete the post. I had to log into my website and delete it manually. The problem with this is it will immediately get sucked up by feedburner and show up in people aggragators. This is really really lame. And it didn’t tell me it was going to do this. If it did, I would have said, no fricking way you piece of poop. You lame piece of poop.

4. Editing in Blogo is freaking weird (and missing features like numbered lists). I had a picture in my post. I deleted the picture like fifty times just trying to delete a blank line above the picture in my post. Then I realized I had to drag down to the bottom of the post. WTHIAHB!? (What the hell in a hand basket?) Also really, really, REALLY lame. And frustrating. And just, well, silly. Why reinvent the wheel here? Try working like every other application on the planet, then we’ll talk.

I’m finding this folder to be a pain in my sitting place. Not all the applications use it, and I frequently am wondering where the heck my files are getting downloaded to. Also, I just realized I have a two hundred and six terrabytes of random stuff in there. I’ve changed Safari and Firefox to download to the desktop so this stuff gets managed properly. I’d delete the folder from my User folder, but Leopard won’t let me. I will, gleefully, delete the shortcut from my dock. Take that, folder. Not so hot now are ya?

Edit: I changed the permissions on this folder to “read only”. Now nobody can save shiznit there. Powned.

Microsoft Office Entourage Sound Sets is one of my pet features I added to Entourage a bazillion years ago. A sound set is basically six sounds that you can change so that when you get new mail, you can hear a duck quack or a clip from your favorite movie – “I’m in the pipe, five by five”. This feature was really fun to add, though generally I like my computers to be as quiet as possible so I don’t really use it. But today I’m working at home due to a sore back so I want Entourage to ping when I get a work email. I want a very quiet, short sound, which is why I dug this feature up again. I find the default sound to be too long and annoying.

Here’s a nice tutorial on how to make a sound set. And here’s a website with a bunch of free sound sets on it. Very cool. Go ahead download them. Annoy your spouses and coworkers. And think of me when you do it.

Edit: I just tried one of these sound sets and Entourage doesn’t recognize it. Turns out the old sound sets aren’t compatible with Entourage 2008. You have to convert them. Here’s how. I find this to be disappointing (but I understand why they did this). I just can’t be bothered to convert over the sounds sets linked above. It would have been nice if Entourage converted them for you. To me this is a little thing that goes a long way toward pleasing users. There’s a fair amount of people who got bit by this.

Here’s some more info on Sound Sets in Entourage 2008:

Google Groups
Apple Support Discussion Group
An Entourage Blog posting
Erik Schwiebert posts about Entourage Sound Sets on arstechnica.com
Another long thread with people banging their heads against this

Sigh. I’m giving up. I can’t get it to work. How sad.

One of the biggest barriers in the way of me posting to my blog is convenience. It’s got to be drop dead easy. Logging into a web page to post is way too painful. Also, it’s way too easy to loose your post if something weird happens. Which happens way too frequently. This is why using a blog posting application is the way to go. First and foremost, you have support for drafts. Save often. Then come back to it.

I’ve recently switched my computer life back to Macintosh. One of the first things I did was look for the best tools for the stuff I do frequently, like post to my blog. Here’s what I discovered.

Bottom line – Ecto is the program to use if you blog on Mac OS X. It has all the required features. WYSWYG editing. Support for all the blogging engines (even Das Blog, which I use). It also has some nice integration with Apple technologies like iTunes and iPhoto. It also has a Amazon.com feature that looks cool, but I haven’t really used it yet. Ecto also has a plugin architecture. For example there are plugins for posting to twitter and flickr.

There are two items I’d like added to the Ecto toolbar – “insert picture” and “insert link”. Ecto supports both of these fine, it’s just a bit awkward to invoke these from the menus. I’ve spent too much time hunting around trying to find the UI to do this. Of course I can drag a picture into my post from the Finder, but this typically isn’t how I want to do things. Ecto costs $17.95, which I gladly paid. I’ve been using Ecto for a while now, and it’s never crashed, and I don’t recall having any problems with it at all. This is a great track record.

I tried Mars Edit as well, and it looks like a fine program but it lacks WSYWYG editing which, for me, is a instant deal buster. And I understand HTML. I think this was be really painful for a less technical person to use. I will certainly look at Mars Edit again when it supports WSYWYG. I really like the Mars Edit icon though, so it has that going for it. Mars Edit costs $29.95, which I think is about twice as expensive as it should be.

As an aside, if you use Windows, there’s no better tool than Windows Live Writer. This program is one of my favorite Microsoft applications ever. In fact before I found Ecto, I blogged with Windows Live Writer from Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac Book Pro. I think this is the gold standard for all blogging applications to judge themselves by. Oh and by the way, Windows Live Writer is free.

Just saw this on Chris Pirillo’s blog. Never heard of a MacBook Pro catching fire before. Not good.

Here’s a list of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.

I was looking for two. Rotate between windows (cmd ~) and restore a window minimzed to the dock (with cmd m), which I didn’t find. Anyone know how to do this from the keyboard?

Haw haw. Blue screen of death. This is what the Mac OS (Leopard) shows me when I choose “Get Info” on my Windows server (Windows home server) from the contextual menu. This is in the “Shared” list on the left side of each finder window. Someone has a sense of humor in Cupertino.

Return to Dark Castle is about to be released for the Mac OS. This is too cool. I used to play this game constantly on my first Macintosh (a Macintosh SE). I still can mimic some of the sound effects all these year later. I’ll buy this in a heartbeat.

Here’s the trailer:

Here’s great list of 20 downloads for your Mac. I use more than a few myself, so I can corroborate the list. Go forth and Macify.

The MacBu talks about their plan for converters for documents written in the new version of Windows Office 2007 here. The converters will convert these files to and from the Mac Office 2004 format. If you read the comments, the MacBu is taking a lot of heat for delivering these “late”. I understand why users are frustrated, but some of the comments are overly harsh. I’m still surprised by the “evil” and “idiots” comments, and the amount of emotion here is just plain nuts. At least from my point of view (but I guess I’d be part of the problem from some of the commenter’s point of view). I think its easy to point fingers and be angry. I think its harder to really understand the issues at hand and have a reasonable semblance of patience or understanding. Read the comments and please go easy if you want to chime in. Or not.