Back in June 2008 I happened across some new blogging software for the Mac called Blogo. The problem was, I was pretty jaded about Mac blogging software having tried MarsEdit, Ecto and MacJournal which all seem to be stuck in the late 90′s from an interface perspective. Sure, they all did the job but left a lot to be desired in terms usability and, dare I say, elegance. This is where Blogo picked up the slack.
Because of my frustration with the various Mac blog editors out there (or lack of any good editor for the most part), I was using a kludgy system of using Parallels running Windows XP and Microsoft LiveWriter (which I reviewed back in 2007). As a side note, I completely swear by LiveWriter, so much so, that when I met the head of the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit at a MacWorld 2009 party, I pleaded with him to do a port over to the Mac platform. LiveWriter works incredibly well, so much so, that I started to benchmark all other blogging editors against it.
When I first looked at Blogo, I thought that it had some promise. It had a unique UI and had the basic feature set that I was looking for. But on my initial review, it had some issues that bothered me. There were problems rendering some of the HTML from previously posted articles, random freezes and crashes, lack of an HTML editor, no off-line editing and the inability to run the program if you weren’t connected to the Internet. All of these items I sent over to the guys at BrainJuice (big thanks to Ben for listening to my complaining) and they actually notified me of new beta builds that fixed all of the things I mentioned.
So I tried build after build and great progress was made. Now, I’m writing this post on version 1.2 (2934) which was just released. I fully used most of the features of Blogo in writing this post and only minimal tweaking within the WordPress editor itself to finalize (ok, actually I lied, I did tweak a tiny bit more using LiveWriter – sorry).
And, as luck would have it, before I could write up this review, Leo Laporte made Blogo his “Pick of Week” on MacBreak Weekly (Episode #125). I must say, Leo knows how to pick them.
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