BlogSchlager WebTech

Part of what I do is evaluate new Web technologies and a lot of my time is spent looking at new web 2.0 technologies. One of the very cool developments in the Blog world is the development of some really first-rate 3rd party editors. I use Microsoft’s new Live Writer in the Windows world and I am in the process of looking for an equally good editor in the OS X world.

Today I am looking at the Freeware Beta offering from Qumana. Connecting Qumana was pretty straight forward and simple so it passes the ease of install threshold. Next is the UI and it too is very functional and intuitive. It is limited however, with very few options bells or whistles. To be fair though it does do the simple things simply and is a big improvement over the text editors built into Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad and that is really where the rubber meets the road.

Qumana does have a spell check built in, the ability to color, bold, italic, underline, strike through, change font family, and font size.

You can add a picture.
You can align your photo left, right, center, or default.

You can add links, and it has the ability to handle multiple blogs. It also has hooks for inserting Google Adwords, Tags and html. It has a WYSIWYG and Source View for power users mode.

The bad news:
The Qumana editor does not allow you to create a page, or if it does I have not found out how.

While trying it out on my BlogSpot Blog I could not for the life of me figure out how to add and upload an image. Every time I tried to add a photo to my blog it would only add the image with a local link to my desktop. I figured OK, maybe the only way to add a photo is to have them already uploaded and link to them. So, I added the photo I wanted to use to my Picasa album and copied the image link. But when I published the article, nope, no image. After about an hour I gave up.

Overall I think that Qumana will satisfy the blogger in every Mac lover. The price is right, and it is a great replacement for those pesky built-in Blog editors. However, it still is not as good by far as the Windows Live Writer by Microsoft. It seems that there is a lot of room for improvement in the Qumana project. It would be nice if someone came up with an editor that was in the same league as Live Writer for the Mac. If you know of one, please send the link my way I would be happy to try it out!