I've been using Blapp for a while now to manage the entries for this blog. It's pretty cool, and I just saw that Michael McCracken now has a badge for his cool software.
Anyhoo, here's credit where it's due:
It's good to see that Michael plans on continuing development of Blapp, even though NetNewsWire Pro will have integrated blog edting. I like Blapp, it's a neat little program. Could use some tweaks, but it's not bad at all. Oh, and it's free, which is a Good Thing.
Here's a couple things that would be nice if added to Blapp:
- Auto-entry-filenames. NNWP has this, and it's quite useful for when you can't immediately think of a unique filename (what else is in the directory? Have I used this name before? ...)
- Some form of WYSIWYG editing. Sure, it's fun (fun?) to edit raw HTML, just like our grandparents did, but sometimes it's just plain annoying. update: must be getting rusty - I had to re-edit this entry 3 times to get the HTML right. Doh.
- Option to re-wire the function of "Publish". I have the dynamic blosxom blog script on my TiBook, and a static rendering on my .Mac account. Publishing, in my case, means calling a perl script with a couple of parameters to update the static blog rendering, rather than just copying new entry .txt files to another directory.
- Better HTML preview. I know this would be best done using the Safari SDK when available. Worth waiting for. It's irritating seeing images go from thumbnail to image display and back again with each keystroke while editing an entry (like the Blapp badge is doing right now. stop it. no, really. stop it. grrr...) I'd even settle for a static preview that I have to manually update (like Dreamweaver has) - that would hopefully prevent the attempted rendering of incomplete HTML elements.
Anyway, Blapp is just plain good software. Thanks, Michael, and keep up the great work!
update: added the http:// prefix to the blapp href.