Moving from my Windows laptop to a Mac laptop means that I also need to find blogging software as I like blogging offline.
Unfortunately, it seems like no ones has designed one that can work as well as Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer, the best blogging software out there.
I have tried a few different Mac options over the last week, read a ton of Top 10 lists (all are basically the same) and finally landed on MarsEdit. But even then it is with a resigned "if I have to" versus a happy transition. It amazes me that no blogging software has caught up to Live Writer, a 5 year old piece of software that hasn’t changed and is free. After a few minutes of work, my view:
- The ability to set a publishing date is very cumbersome. You have to do it through menus, versus Live Writer where it is on the main screen and a simple “click” and “pick”.
- The information and selection bar on Live Writer is very robust covering insertions, and changing as you put pictures into the WYSIWYG interface (crop, set default picture size etc.)
- Live Writer goes against your blog and pulls down you last 50 posts and gives you the option of choices to pull down all of your posts (if you want).
- Live Writer has a simple interface to allow for multiple blog support.
- After only an hour of playing with MarsEdit I was left with the opinion that this product is a 5 at best and definitely not worth $40. I have no problem paying, but it has to be at least as good as Microsoft’s free product and it is not.So I installed Parallels, Windows 7 and Live Writer. Problem solved in a cumbersome manner and Windows lives on.
Michael Weening: a few pictures 
SmartXBlog is desktop blog editor for both windows and mac , it has WYSIWYG editor, image editor, online content search and rss feed available from nearly 100 popular websites and you can even add your own rss and preview and publish directly to WordPress site or save as draft. i think it is best available blogging desktop editor for windows and mac. Free trial can be downloaded from
http://smartxblog.com/
Why would I pay $69 for a 5 user license when Windows Live Writer is awesome and free. They need a more reasonable single user license.
I have used Windows Live Writer and that seems awesome. But what if you have all its functionality available in SmartXBlog and with extra features like image editor, rss reader, content manager, bookmarks and last but not the least is pop up alerts of your comments. And obviously, SmartXBlog runs both on mac and windows, so it removes plat form dependability. I think its worth trying. It comes up with 30 days trial.
70 bucks .. for a blog writer seems ridiculous.