Why do I always end up responding to Tim’s posts?
Today Tim discusses the sad state of affairs with blog authoring tools. I too have tried Ecto and MarsEdit. In my opinion MarsEdit is superior (and more Aqua-y), but, as Tim says, it has a ways to go. When my 30 day free trial expired I removed it and went back to the WordPress HTML interface.
Anyway, here’s a thought on how to solve this. I don’t think anyone should be creating a blog authoring tool and then grafting on the HTML WYSIWYG goodness. Instead, it should be the other way round. Find a nice HTML editor and add support for the MetaWeblog API and UI support for bloggy notions of categories and trackbacks, etc. And if you’re looking for a nice, cross-platform, HTML editor, well, here’s one right here: NVU. NVU is derived from the Mozilla composer source base and already works on Linux, Windows, and Mac. And best of all, it’s open source, so someone smarter and younger than I am should be able to graft on the code needed to make this work as a blogging tool. I’d pay for that.