Shawn Blanc Reviews MarsEdit
February 2nd, 2008I have been looking forward to this for several weeks. Some time ago, Shawn Blanc announced that he would be writing extensive reviews of some of his favorite Mac applications. Much to my delight, MarsEdit was to be among them. It so happened that the timing of his MarsEdit review lined up with when I was planning to release 2.1, so I gave him the heads up and he held off until 2.1 was live.
MarsEdit: Helping the Personal Publishing Revolution
What I love about Shawn’s review is the way he zeroes in more on the philosophy and feel of the application, as opposed to merely running down the features list as so many reviews are likely to do. Shawn even did some investigative journalism, contacting MarsEdit’s icon designer, Bryan Bell, and digging up this gem of an artifact from the original design process:
One of the things MarsEdit gets flak for from some potential customers is its lack of a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Usually the people who are most wanting of this feature frankly can’t imagine how it could possibly be absent. On the other hand, the vast majority of people who love MarsEdit and use it daily seem to not care one iota about the feature. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: WYSIWYG editing is in MarsEdit’s future, but I’ll be careful not to violate at all the existing power of MarsEdit’s reliable “what you see is what you send” editor.
Shawn’s review doesn’t ding MarsEdit for its lack of rich editing, but instead emphasizes the value of editing in plain text:
“In all my experience with WYSIWYG editors I have found them a clumsy enemy of fine web typography. Typing a weblog post in a WYSIWYG editor is a bit like laying out a book in Microsoft Word.
…
MarsEdit has combined many of the WYSIWYG concepts and implemented them into the HTML editor making it all very easy to use.”
I really agree with this attitude. Which is not to say I don’t respect people who want WYSIWYG. It’s a great idea and will empower non-technical users to express their thoughts more freely. And that’s part of what MarsEdit is all about. But MarsEdit is also about serious publishing, and if you’re serious, you should consider designing your blog so that the “style” is handled on the server, not in the client. The primary goal of MarsEdit is to quickly and efficiently transmit your thoughts to your blog. And the most efficient way to do that is in plain-text, semantically organized with MarsEdit’s powerful markup macro system.
And … MarsEdit’s WYSIWYG support is gonna kick all kinds of ass.
February 4th, 2008 at 6:35 am
In my view, the lack of rich text editing features impairs the non techies in the readability factor of whatever they’re writing. What matters is not pixel-perfect rendering of what will appear on the blog post for typographic pleasure, but more the structure of it.
A title embedded in <h1> tags is not as readable as something that actually looks like a title. Even worse with HTML entities.
I’ll gladly leave the typography to my server side, as long as I can properly read what I’m writing (and no, having a parallel preview window is not the same. And yes, I’m sure MarsEdit WYSIWYG will kick ass)
February 4th, 2008 at 9:52 am
I haven’t updated mine yet. I’m still using the trial so I imagine that would hinder me from taking advantage of the update. I’ll be buying it later this week. I usually try it out for a few weeks before I make the purchase. I’ve tested it out for a little over a week, and I’m really impressed with it.
I’ll be writing a review at the technology website where I write. I write for their Mac website. I also use MarsEdit when I’m writing there. I see only a slight difference of what I see when I’m writing so I imagine it has to do with my permissions?
I don’t mind adding the code, but I know some who will be turned off by that.