Review: Blogo - Mac Blog Writing Software

It has been a well established fact for years that the Macintosh platform has a great shareware community. While there is not quite the wide selection of software on a Mac than on a Windows PC, most of the time what does exist is spectacular. For a while now Windows have been able to use Windows Live Writer for their blogging needs, but on the Mac there was not much that successfully mimicked Live Writer’s power and ease of use while retaining a Mac-flare. Blogo, an application from Brainjuice, has filled that hole.

Blogo is a great blogging application for the Mac that simplifies and enhances your experience writing blog posts. The interface is simple, yet powerful and feels very much like a Mac application. The button layout is a little odd being primarily a vertical column and is not quite as intuitive as I would like sometimes. None of the icons are labeled and unless you know what each symbol means you can find yourself slightly confused as to what each button does.

What makes it a little confusing is the add image box and the dropbox right next to each other. You can drag in images from the dropbox, but you can insert them from the Finder in image box. After you add an image it will list in the left box and you can crop and adjust an image’s alignment in the dropbox. That unfortunately is about where the image editing ends. You can make an image sepia tone or grayscale, but I would have really liked having more tools to work with. That is one of my only major complaints of this application because having the power of a native application I honestly expected a little more options. Blogo has all the standard texting editing features of your average Wordpress, Blogger, or Squarespace blog. One of the main draws of this application is the full screen mode, which is excellent and the feature that will make you realize why the developer designed the UI the way they did. You can choose between a nice gray or blue background, both of which really help you focus on your writing. I appreciate this feature because in a busy world of Facebook, IM, Twitter, and text messages this helps me to really focus in on my writing.

I guess the main draw of Blogo is it’s ability to store your blog posts locally and write even if you do not have an internet connection. At this Blogo excels and will automatically download all of your posts, both past and present. The nicest thing about all of this is that Blogo does a really good job of properly formatting your text and giving you an extremely accurate idea of what your post is going to look like before your upload it. Blogo supports blog services such as Wordpress, Blogger, Drupal, Typepad, and many others. Micro-blogging services are supported like Twitter or Ping.fm. The micro-blogging support is a little underwhelming and only really serves to push your articles onto the various social networks. In the preferences for each blog you can actually set your posts to automatically tweeted out by Blogo. It does support multiple accounts and switching between them is just a click away. One really nice feature that can be easily overlooked is Blogo’s bookmarklet, which allows you to easily post Youtube, Flickr, and any highlighted text. If you use the bookmarklet with some highlighted text the text is automatically quoted with the source URL added to your post. This feature is extremely useful and makes inserting embeddable photos, video, or just citing websites a breeze.

If you are serious into blogging I suggest taking a look at Blogo. It is an excellent application that speeds up and simplifies most of the common tasks of the average blogger. After using it to bash out a few posts you will be hooked. There is a 21 day trial on Brain Juice’s website and if you like it be sure to support the developer and buy it. When you buy it you do get 3 licenses for your personal use, which is really nice because it allows you to have Blogo installed on several of your Macs least you are suddenly grasped with the will to write a post. I really recommend this application and suggest that anyone who is serious about blogging on a Mac should look at.

Blogo

Full Version: $24.99

By: Hunt Henning (www.thedigitalcheatsheet.com)