myBlog manages, publishes and uploads blog to your web space
Originally downloaded 10/14/06. myBlog is a new Mac OS X app that lets you write, format, and publish articles to a blog. Unfortunately, the application description pages are presented in blog format, so I couldn’t find a succinct or complete description of its capabilities. Guess I’ll have to download to find out…
Update 1/26/07. I had tried myBlog last October when it first came out, but I couldn’t believe it was really as lame as it seemed. Figured I must have been tired and decided to revisit it later… Well, later came today, and I’m puzzled to report that myBlog is definitely lame. The developer updated it to 1.1.2, but that’s as far as it went in October and hasn’t been enhanced since then. I kept thinking he might, um, spend a little more time polishing a piece of software he expects someone to pay $12.95 for, but it ain’t happened yet.
One very huge problem is that myBlog gives no indication what type of blog system it supports. I entered the data for my WordPress blog, and after adding a short test post and publishing it, myBlog acted like it had done something, even inviting me to view the entry in my browser! Then, it opened TextEdit, which promptly crashed. I visited my test blog site, and as I suspected, there’s no sign of my test post from myBlog. Apparently, myBlog simply wrote out an HTML file or two on my hard drive in the directory it asked me to set up… but then, why does it ask for the information on my blog, including my username/password, if it can’t really connect and upload to it? As for TextEdit, I can only assume that there’s an error in the way myBlog is writing the header information for the HTML file… surely it wouldn’t add TextEdit as the file creator?
In addition to that fundamental flaw, myBlog has an inscrutible interface that is frustrating as all get out. It appears to be patterned loosely on Pages and iWeb, with a little inspector on the side. But in fact you can’t do anything except type in one of the three windows that shows up. You can use the menubar (no toolbar) to do things like add images, links, and movies (huh?), but this is totally lame. You can also use the inspector to add links (I think). The inspector is also where you define text style and color for your blog, but not while you’re inspecting anything. Also, there’s a field in the inspector for adding a post image, which is cool… but the interface puts that image in one of the text fields you can’t type in, and doesn’t even attempt to display it fully. Meanwhile, a large arrow remains in one of the other text fields with no apparent purpose. I dragged an image to that field just to get rid of it, but later the arrow came back somehow.
To top everything off, the user interface shows no understanding of what parameters to set in putting together a Cocoa interface. The window itself can be dragged into oblivion (see screenshot), and the developer isn’t using the tools Apple provides to make sure page elements rearrange themselves sensibly as the user resizes the window. The choice of elements themselves is highly questionable, as is their placement on the window palette. But enough!
At this point, I’ve really had all I can stand of myBlog, and it gives me a really bad taste for trying out the developer’s other software, all of which sounds interesting. He’s got an HTML editor, an accounting tool, and a folder synching utility. Maybe in another few months I’ll feel up to trying one of those…
Version as tested: 1.1.2
