iBlog Originally downloaded April 14, 2007. I had tried the first version of iBlog and wasn't terribly impressed... it just wasn't flexible enough to interest me. Unlike tools like Ecto and MarsEdit, iBlog is a blog publishing platform you would use instead of Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc. The new version appears to have added a very flexible template builder, which also incorporates a tabbed editing environment for managing your template and style files. It also supports any iLife data types and can publish to any FTP or .Mac site. In this way, it's similar to Apple's iWeb, but is much more flexible. In addition, it apparently incorporates an HTML code editor in addition to the WYSIWYG editing tools you'd expect from a tool like this. All in all, it sounds like a worthy upgrade... but just how much it's worth isn't yet known, since there's no pricing listed (yet). At this point, I've downloaded release candidate 2 for iBlog 2.0.

Version as tested: 2.0 RC2.

Update 8/17/12.

Well, 5 years later I'm finally trying out iBlog which, by the way, is $30 per license. And what a disappointment it's turned out to be! Not only has the software not been updated in 5 years, which makes it almost abandon-ware, but it doesn't do what I expected. The concept is far more ambitious than the result, and iBlog is only suitable for very simple instances where you just want to upload HTML and images. If you're using WordPress or some other data-driven blog, this won't do at all. Its "templates" are very primitive compared with what you can get for free from popular packages like WordPress. Finally, it has no WYSIWYG capability that I could see... you can't format lists, tables, or use layers, without typing them in by hand. You can toggle between code and preview mode, but that's a pretty basic feature in an HTML editor. The interface is also very plain-jane and amateurish, and the app kept crashing on me. If you want to set up a blog, look elsewhere: This is not a worthwhile option.