App: Ecto 3

Price: $17.95 or £9.58

Leopard Ready: Yes

Ecto is a great desktop blogging app for the mac it supports a wide range of blogging platforms such as Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, SquareSpace, TypePad and WordPress it website with a good community and the forums which are very helpful. It also has support for plugins and soon scripting. There are only a few problems with it and one is if you are using WordPress as I am, in-order to get tags to act as they do in the web interface you have to go to the Ecto menu – settings – weblog – templates – tags – and choose keywords out of the Put tags in menu. This is a bit of a pain but only has to be done once. It can also take some time to add tags because of the way they are managed.

It lacks a live preview like in Windows Live Writer. One other minor problem is the site tells you to use the help menu in Ecto to look for help, but that then says there is no help for Ecto! if under the help menu which is not useful. Importing media is great you can use the built in media browser or drag and drop it, it also give you the choice of uploading to your flickr account. Ecto gives you all the other basics such as setting the time for a post to be published and word counts which you would expect, the one reason I chose Ecto over MarsEdit2 is because of the visual editor and it is a lot easier to use. Ecto is a very well rounded desktop blogging app but there are some small easy changes that it could do with. I shall continue to use it as my way or desktop blogging.