Looking at Bleezer

After MarsEdit turned out to be less than optimal with the new Blogger (for now), I am trying to find another tool that might work. I’m new to this whole thing, but Bleezer seems to fit the essential qualities of what I would like:

  • I can actually post titles (unlike MarsEdit, for now).
  • Like MarsEdit, it gives me the ability to see previews of what I’m typing. Unlike MarsEdit, there’s a compose mode where I can try to type a little bit WYSIWYG (From what I can tell, MarsEdit is a strange, although mostly intuitive, mix).
  • I can ping a few sites for notification, i.e. Technorati. Again this is like MarsEdit.
  • I can write things in Unicode, and it escapes everything appropriately. See: तलमाथि. 日本語. It did that for me.
  • Hopefully, tags work.

On the other hand, there are some definite downsides.

  • 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.
  • Seriously, what’s the deal with the saving files? In order to save a post you’re working on, you save an individual file. Fine, that’s not as good as MarsEdit’s database, but hardly a major issue. Unfortunately, it doesn’t remember where you saved the file. So every time you want to save, it asks where to save it. And of course, it doesn’t remember the directory you saved in, either. So if, say, you’re used to saving a draft every minute or so, this gets annoying very fast.
  • 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.
  • Undo doesn’t seem to work.
  • The “Compose” tab is really not all that useful. There’s probably a reason MarsEdit doesn’t have it.
  • 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 probably just a bug, but kind of annoying.

Right now, the upsides are more important to me than the downsides. Of course, I’m assuming this actually gets posted.

Edit: And it appears I can’t even post through Bleezer. And then I couldn’t reopen my draft. I ended up having to open the saved file in a text editor and heavily edit it to even make it readible. Oh, and then post it through the regular web interface.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'm the author of Bleezer. Thanks for trying it. There are certainly some things that could improve, especially where saving posts is concerned.

The GetPosts should work fine, but I've been having some issues with the switch to the new Blogger.
February 11, 2007 at 10:21 AM
Bruce M. Adcock said…
Hopefully my comments didn’t come off as overly harsh. I’ve actually tried a few other blogging clients, but they weren’t even worth mentioning. Once I’ve finished up a bit of work, I intend to try out version 0.9.8.1 and see if I still have any problems. I’m also horrible about sending in bug reports to people, but if I run in to any problems I’ll make sure to send those in.
February 11, 2007 at 3:39 PM
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