Blog editors for the Mac

Hi Greg,

I appear to be in the same predicament as you. I tried the trial version of Mars Edit and like it very much, especially since you can have multiple blogs and switch between them easily. Then I started doing my research and got thoroughly confused. The way I see it, there are three main options out now and depending on what you want:

Mars Edit: I've heard, and this looks to be, the gold standard for blogging on Mac OS. This review by Stephen Hackett is certainly favorable.

ByWord: From everything I can tell, this is a great text editor for both Mac and iOS (though I haven't tried it for myself yet). For an additional purchase, it does allow you to publish to Wordpress; I've got an email in to them asking if they support multiple blogs. This app intrigues me because of its easy keyboard shortcuts for markdown and iOS integration. It is also highly recommended by the Sweet Setup.

Ulysses: I think this is similar to byWord, albeit organizing your writing in different ways. Think of it as the child ByWord and scrivner would have together. david sparks uses this for his blogging workflow, and talks about Ulysses extensively on this Mac Power Users podcast. As with ByWord, you can't edit posts once you post them. Ulysses is a subscription service for all your devices, while the other apps are outright purchases.

All that said, I'm not sure which app I'm going with yet. I might just pick up Mars edit now and then byword later. Each has its merits and shortcomings.

That's my two cents. Did you make a decision since this topic was posted? would love to know your outcome.

Chelsea

Hello,

I use Byword for general Markdown writing. I haven't used the blog posting features, but if you need a Markdown writer, then Byword will do the job.

I've used MarsEdit for a little while and really like it. My personal website is actually hosted on Dreamwidth, but MarsEdit works very well with it too. Dreamwidth is actually a fork of both WordPress and Live Journal. From what I've read, LJ was never that accessible and the developers of Dreamwidth wanted to change that. At least one of them is a former LJ employee. But in addition to my personal site, I recently registered with WordPress to help out with another project. I'm still figuring some things out, but the back end of WordPress itself is now very accessible with VoiceOver. One issue I've had is that I can't seem to configure MarsEdit to work well with the project website, which is hosted on WordPress. But I'm going to try some other things and see what happens.