16/07/08
Posted in Design, Interface, Internet, Usability | 5 Comments » 
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Business Week, with the help of Don Norman, John Maeda, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman among others, just published an excellent article with the 10 commandments of web design.
Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.
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30/05/08
Posted in Interface, Mac OS, Usability, Wordpress | 5 Comments » Tweet This Post
I’m writing this on a lobby before a meeting with a client. Thanks to MarsEdit, a nifty desktop blogging app, I can write this while I’m offline and worry later about publishing this post.
Nothing new actually, as I had been using Ecto previously. But somehow, with the improvements to the Wordpress post editor and with the vision of “doing more with less” I ended up not using it at all. It got fed to AppZapper after a while.
But times change and posting in four different blogs currently, I thought I could use a little help from a desktop app.
With that philosophy in mind I tried to use TextMate, which I already use for programming, as a publishing client. TextMate’s versatility allow for that and much more and is the blogging tool of choice for many bloggers.
My experience with TextMate:
- Configuration is done and kept in a flat txt file
- Posts are not automatically synchronized with those of your database. You just write in a flat txt file that gets uploaded via rpc to your blog.
- No local copy of the posts is kept on your computer unless you save the file as a flat text file
- Categories are not passed down to TextMate from WP so you actually need to remember them and add them as meta information on your, again, flat text file
- I didn’t get any further
TextMate may be the best editor for the Mac OS (despite its funny tab management) but as a desktop publishing app is a nightmare.
At that point I left the “do more with less” philosophy to embrace the “do the right thing with the right tool”, which brought me back to Ecto, a nice app that worked extremely fine for me a couple of years ago. But when you use a Mac for a while you start to get very picky about the design of the user interface and functionality of the apps.
You want apps that are laid out nicely, have an internal and external user interface coherence, that are not too much bloated with features and excel at doing the essential. Ecto sure does a lot of stuff but the app somehow doesn’t look and feel right on Leopard.
So I decided to try MarsEdit, a blogging client extremely similar to Leopard’s Mail that also follows the one window approach.
My Experience with MarsEdit:
- Setting up the blogs was as easy as feeding MarsEdit the URLs and entering ID and password. No need to know where the xmlrpc file sits
- I automatically downloaded my 10 last posts and all my available categories
- No learning curve. Posting is as easy as sending a mail
- A live preview that shows you the final render of the post as you type. No need to reload constantly
- Ability to use TextMate (or any) as your favorite external editor
- Blog this! Bookmarklet on your browser
- Flickr integration. Enter you FlickrID and password, authorize the app, and all your pics are ready to be blogged
- Upload files with just drag and drop on your post
- Easily republish same content to another blog
- Spellcheck as you type
- Applescript support
- Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox
- Growl! integration
I use MarsEdit to post to:
ganyet.com
iosephdurgell.org
RAC1.org/elmon
wearemortensen.com/blog
