Blogo: Simple Desktop Blogging

If you write for, or maintain a blog, you know how tedious it can be to fiddle with the online interfaces while writing. If you write for multiple blog, this tediousness is compounded. For this reason, developers have created desktop blogging clients.

Of the people that I have spoken with, many prefered the likes of MarsEdit and Ecto. I was thinking about getting one of these to use myself, when I came across a client called Blogo that I thought I would give a try.

When Blogo opens, you are greeted with a very simple interface. At the top of Blogo, there are two big tabs labeled “New” and “Edit.” There is a place to enter the post title, a box for the actual post content itself, a place for keywords/categories, and two boxes for images.

Entering a title in Blogo is pretty straightforward, just type in the “Title” box. When typing your entry on the “Body” box, it can feel weird at first typing in such a small space, but you do get used to it after a while. To the right of the box you are typing in, there are options for formatting your post. The selection is your basic formatting options, like bold, italic, quote, list etc. The chain button is for adding links. Clicking in the little box (in the screenshot above there is a 7 in it) beside the title drops down a calendar which lets you set the time-stamp for your post.

The button at the very bottom right of the “Body” box is for fullscreen. This is a nice feature, as you can go fullscreen, and do everything from drafting your blog post to publishing it without having to leave the fullscreen mode which can lead to distractions (as I’m sure you all know).

For categories and keywords, hitting the “#” key will drop down a list of all the categories currently associated with your blog, you just need to scroll down until you find the one(s) you are looking for.

The next part of Blogo is adding images. To add an image, just drag it onto the dropbox, or you can find it in the Finder by clicking the “+” sign in the box to the left of the dropbox. When you add an image, you will be given the option to crop and resize the image to your liking. This is something that I really like, as usually I open ImageWell to resize screenshots etc.

The last part of Blogo’s interface is the three buttons at the bottom. The big one at the bottom labeled “Post” does exactly what you would expect it to do, which is post the entry to your blog. The button that looks like a book lets you save your draft, and the button that looks like the quick look icon lets you preview how your post will look on your blog right inside of Blogo. This preview is a full preview, meaning what you see in Blog will be exactly what will be posted to your blog.

The “Edit” tab lets you edit your drafts or posted items, with the same options you have when creating a new post.

Overall, Blogo is a very minimal and clean desktop blogging client. My only major qualm with Blogo is the size of the text-box for writing the body of your post. It can get pretty cramped in there once you begin to add images etc., which is why I usually work in the fullscreen mode, which gives you a little more room to breathe.

Unfortunately, Blogo does have a downfall, which is its apparent lack of offline support. A few days ago I went outside to work on a few things (this review being one of those things), which was out of range of my wireless base station. When I went to launch Blogo, I was told that it could not verify my license information, and then quit. One feature I would like for Blogo, would to be to first of all support launching while not connected to the internet, and secondly, support saving drafts offline. At the moment, you can only save drafts directly into WP, Blogger etc. Though on Brainjuice’s FAQ, they say that saving drafts to your computer is a feature in the works.

Blogo retails for $25, from Brainjuice. And may I just say, that even though the icon has absolutely nothing to do with blogging, it is one of the coolest I have ever seen. Look out for a review of Ecto and other desktop blogging clients on MacApper soon.

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