My previous post was commented by the Ecto developer himself… and as such, I thought it only be fair to immediately reevaluate the said software… plus of course I was excited as hell to try his suggestions out.

So now, I’m posting via Ecto, I’ve seen the edit mode he was talking about (I couldn’t imagine how I missed that). And upon posting this, I will try his other suggestion of selecting the category while publishing to specify the primary category.

If all goes well, then I guess that’s that… I will now be an official Ecto user.ecto: http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/ “What is Ecto?”

The praises I forgot to give

In my last post, I was too busy finding fault when I forgot to mention any of the numerous features Ecto had.

One cool UI decision was putting almost all the relevant panes immediately visible to the user. That means the body and extended entry, and the option to show the keywords and summary (aka excerpt) without having to leave any other view (unlike MarsEdit)

Another feature was the auto-saving of drafts – after a certain time, you’d see a dialog popup unobtrusively mentioning that it is saving the local copy of the draft.

Another is the extensive customizability of the functions. The “code templates” can also be customized, this is very useful for people who are used to special syntax, or accustomed to a certain coding workflow.

What I particularly like was the way it handled images to be attached. You enter a file, it creates a code… you click on the code and it pops up a dialog window with all the possible adjustments you could make before posting… after which it can upload the file and reflect the html snippet in your draft… very nifty indeed.

I also like how it has a history of your links… so you can easily reference stuff without having to bookmark left and right.

And of course, there’s Growl support!

Nothing is perfect

Couple of bugs though: Right now, it’s all defaulted to HTML (both editing and draft), and opening/starting posts seem to reflect the settings now… but as I type this (in HTML mode mind you), upon checking on Format > Edit Mode, for some reason Rich Text is still checked (though clearly I’m already in HTML mode)

UPDATE

So it seems the categories indeed have a certain way to work… but work nonetheless, I can live with this!