Bleezer, Round Two

When I last wrote four days ago, I was trying out a blogging client called Bleezer. In retrospect, it ended a little bit more critically than I really intended it to be. I will admit, though, that I have been getting a little frustrated with blogging clients in general. Posting through a web interface is not really my thing, and I can imagine that this is true for a lot of other people. Trying different blogging clients out there has kind of left me wondering how all of my favorite blogs seem to get updated so often.

Anyway, after my post Larry Borsato (the person behind Bleezer) left a comment, which was geneal enough to convince me to keep trying. Actually, I probably would have in any case, since this program does have a lot of potential. And yesterday Bleezer was updated to version 0.9.8.2, which makes it (0.982 - 0.980) ÷ 0.980 ≈ 0.2% better than version 0.9.8 (which I was using). I guess the question is if this makes it usable for me?

First off, I’ll start by saying that all of the good points I mentioned when I last talked about Bleezer still hold true. Sometimes, updates to applications will remove features I like, not unlike some local grocery stores that apparently track what I buy most often, in a concerted effort to discontinue carrying those very items. So it was nice to see this not happen. Let me go through the bad points I talked about last time, and see what’s changed. Oh, and now that I’ve finished my lab for my OpenGL class, I send in a bug report to Mr. Borsato, instead of him having to find me.

“It’s very obviously a Java application, which has the upside for the developer of not needing to compile it multiple times. Unfortunately, this makes it very unMac-like.” This obviously wouldn’t have changed and I don’t really expect it to (or even want it to). If it let’s him update the program for multiple platforms more quickly, then I’m willing to make that trade-off. Incidentally, I noticed that I was wrong about him not needing to compile multiple times, since he does have different packaged versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

“Seriously, what’s the deal with saving files?” This part still holds true, and I would say that not having it remember where you last saved is probably Bleezer’s current weak spot. I should point out that I don’t have a problem with saving each post as an individual file. After needing to extract the text from my last post to be able to put it up, I must admit that’d be nice to be able to save as a different file type. Markdown would be the best for me, but plain HTML makes the most sense, I’d guess.

“It doesn’t seem to be able to hold on previously written posts. It has a ‘Get Posts’ button, but that doesn’t actually seem to do anything.” This now works! I’ve only tried this with the button for now, not by going to “File→Open Post…”.

“Undo doesn’t seem to work.” This now works! Both through the toolbar (the lower one), going to “Edit→Undo”, or typing “⌘-Z”. Redo seems to likewise work, but I have not tested it as much.

“The ‘Compose’ tab is really not all that useful.” I’ve actually done most of the writing of this post in the “Compose” tab, so it’s not as bad as my initial reaction. However, I’ve noticed a long delay when starting a new paragraph or pasting text in. I amn’t sure that this is Bleezer’s fault, since I’m also compiling GCC 4.2 right now. Although, I did just quit a reopen Bleezer and the problem went away.

“No matter the fact that I set my own blog in the preferences, it tells me that I’m now writing for the blog ‘Larry Borsato: A few thoughts…’”. This is fixed!

So that about wraps that up. I’ll probably write more about my experiences with Bleezer as I use it more. There are already a few things that I could write about, but I’ll save that for another post. Oh, and I guess it goes without saying that I have no idea if this will post yet. Basically, if it says “Powered by Bleezer” at the bottom of this post, you can be sure that it worked.

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