This is the second series of experiments I am conducting with the offline blog clients. The last time when I tested a few clients, I found nothing to my liking.
But this time, things look promosing.. at least at the moment. I am currently evaluating two pieces of software
This is the first test post I am doing with Zoundry.
I am looking for the following features:
- The ability to upload pictures through the client
- Spellchecker
- Support for Unicode so that I can blog easily in Thamiz
- Support for categories
- Pinging other sites from the blog client
- Ability to edit posts as HTML
Let me see how these two software perform.
Testing Zoundry:
- Still working with Zoundry. Everything went fine. But during post it came with a error message. Zoundry still thinks that my post is not published. But I can see that this post is now visible from my Blog.
- I still could not find out how I can directly edit the HTML code for this post.
- Testing Unicode. தமிழ௠(Good. Unicode Works)
- Pinging works sometimes and throws up an error other times. I am not sure if this a bug or a problem with the sites I am trying to ping. (Still needs testing)
- Slecting the category of the post and posting under multiple categories is working fine.
- Spellchecker – Can not find any.
Uploading images works perfectly. However the lack of feature to edit HTML does not allow to position the image as we wish.
Pros:
- Easy to use.
- The standard features should suffice the requirements of most bloggers (especially those who are not very comfortable with HTML)
- The ability to specify the tag words for Technorati and other tagging services can come handy for those who want to increase the traffic to their websites.
Cons:
- Lack of HTML editing feature is a major problem for advanced users
- The usability of the software will be a lot better if there were shortcuts to commonly used functions. For example a shortcut for started ‘Lists’ will make things a lot easier.
- Does not seem to support a lot of basic HTML tags to align your pages. The most needed ones like headers H1, H2.. are missing.
- Spellcheck will be a very useful addition. But it is still missing.
Update: After writing this post I came across this thread in the Zoundry forums.
The resulting code of the sample page I created with Zoundry looks very close to XHTML. All in all Zoundry is an excellent software for most users. The software is still in its Beta stage. In fact the version I tested is 0.9.133. I hope that by the time they release the first public version, the software will be much more better.
Personally I am going to try this software for some time. But in the mean time I intend to test Post2Blog as well.
On the other hand there are other upcoming software like ‘Flock’ which offers a lot of promise. The future of internet looks promising indeed.
technorati tags: Offline Blogging, Flock, Mozilla Browser