It’s no secret I’m an Apple fanboy, and my main computer is a two year old 13” Macbook. I have Office on it plus iWorks. Ok I have to admit that I prefer iWorks over Office on the Mac (whether that will still hold true once I upgrade Office to Office ‘11 I don’t know).
The iLife suite is better than the Microsoft offerings on Windows. And that’s the point really moving to the Mac has been great and I don’t miss the wider selection of apps available on Windows. Usually I can find an equivalent on the Mac to the Windows version. Take for example Paint.net on Windows, a great piece of free software. Well sadly it’s not available on the Mac, but recently I found an equivalent called Pixelmator. Which has the same functionality but is not free, it’s about £17. Not that expensive really for a great app.
But there is one area (apart from games) I think that the Windows platform still has no competition and that is stand alone blogging software. The king in this area for me is the amazing Windows Live Writer (WLW) from Microsoft, which is also free. In fact I like WLW so much it is the only reason I run a virtual machine on my Mac.
Now some Mac users may say oh we have MarsEdit or Bloggo. But in reality these are just not in the same league as WLW. For instance let’s take how MarsEdit and Bloggo handle images. Where in WLW I can drag and drop in images, resize the thumbnail, have more than one image on a line, the whole experience in the Mac apps is completely sub standard. Both Mac apps allow me to drag and drop in images. But Bloggo won’t let me have more than one on a line (ie next to each other), while MarsEdit will but I can’t resize the thumbnail!! I even tried editing the HTML in the apps but as soon as it switches back to the visual mode it undoes the edits!!
For me the Mac standalone blogging apps are not more advanced than the iOS blogging apps like Blogpress. Which frankly give me as much control on image positioning in a post as the Mac equivalent.
So until these “mature” stand alone blogging apps on the Mac actually pull their finger out and try and come up with apps that can compare to WLW it looks like I am stuck with using XP in a virtual machine just so I can blog using WLW.
Posts
