Qumana has released the 3.0 beta of their blog editor, touting the following features:
- a “blog manager” that locally stores your drafts and published posts
- support for trackbacks and pinging
- improved editor with valid XHTML, plus ability to view and edit code
- a way to refresh the editor (‘New Post’) – to clear away published material and start a new post instantly
- improved image dialogue, including preview and auto upload trigger from Drag & Drop
Looking through their Tour, there’s some remarkable similarities in their workflows to how we’ve solved similar issues in Flock (adding a blog, tagging). This suggests to me that there is some consolidation and consensus emerging in client-side blogging apps. MarsEdit 1.1 similarly added tags late last year and some other niceties.
Some things are still pretty unique to each editor… like Qumana’s Adgenta program or the DropPad feature that enables drag and drop blogging from the desktop (Ecto has something like this as well). Ecto also features email integration with the Mac Address Book to notify your friends of updated posts.
But so besides pimping Qumana’s release (hey, more choice is a good thing!), I also wanted to point out that we’re starting to see at the least the beginnings of some standard features in blogging apps, including a kludge for consistently adding tags to posts. As I use the excellent Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag my posts (when composing via the web interface), I’m hoping that tags will soon become something represented in the standard blogging APIs (I know Matt‘s already done some work on this that we’ll be taking advantage of soon). Once that happens, tools like Flock, Performancing, Ecto, MarsEdit, Qumana and so on will be able to offer native tag support and not just append that extra data to the body of the posts.
Factory Joe 