MarsEdit vs Ecto – the battle is over… for now…

Published by neil on November 11th, 2004 5 Comments »

For a week or two now I’ve been posting to this blog with either MarsEdit or Ecto remote clients. Both seem to do a pretty good job, but what’s the verdict… I hear you cry…

Both are capable and both integrate with my fairly standard installation of WordPress – I’ve tweaked styles and one or two custom tags in the template, but nothing that will interfere with content.

Read on for a full breakdown of the two applications and how I decided which to shell out some hard-earned money on Shareware fees.

Ecto

Pros:

• Cheaper – £10.31 (based on exchange rate at time of writing)
• Multiple blog support
• Good custom tag support
• Automatic insertion of HTML Paragraph tags from text
• Insert currently playing iTunes with just a button click
• Easy formatting of text styles
• iPhoto integration
• Easy and advanced image and attachment capabilities, including resizing and thumbnail generation (see description)
• Trackback/Ping support
• Timed auto-save
• Full RTF (switchable to HTML) article editing
• Safari bookmarklet

Cons:

• Draft and published postings in a single list only differentiated by an icon
• May require minor update to WordPress installations to function correctly
• Did not download existing WordPress draft posts
• Some RTF editing and style glitches (particularly with HTML lists when switching between RTF and HTML editing)
• Image alignment issues when posted to blog
• No contextual menus in editor
• Dull application icon

I did have some trouble getting Ecto to work correctly as on initial setup, it did not want to sync with the blog properly by not downloading the online subject categories. The app also refused to work with any images or file attachments, greying out al image related menu items.
This frustrating start almost made me give up on it, but I finally discovered that in order to work with images and WordPress, one has to set the blog account compatibility to ‘Movabletype’ (I had it set to the default ‘Blogger’ api at the start.

Once that issue was dealt with I was immensely impressed with it’s image handling capabilities, almost too many options for the most part. Ecto uploads the attached images upon posting without any additional effort from the user, though I have come across an issue with the resulting image alignment – I think Ecto’s applied image style tags are conflicting with my generic site CSS; I suspect it’s easily fixed.

Ecto does require a simple update to WordPress 1.2 in order to integrate correctly. But this is simply a matter of uploading a fixed version of the WordPress xmlrpc.php file (info at the Ecto website), which may already have been integrated into the standard WordPress install by this time.

MarsEdit

Pros:

• Slick usage, more intuitive
• Immediate compatibility with WordPress 1.2 install
• Additional applescripts as standard
• Google search applescript (just excellent!)
• One-step url paste into selected text
• Subfolder for Draft items – better organisation
• Easy separation of standard and extended post content
• Safari bookmarklet
• Cool application icon!

Cons:

• Clunky image handling
• Less advanced control over images and attached files
• More expensive than Ecto (£13.42 at time of writing)
• Some knowledge of HTML required for formatting posts
• Still rated as Beta

I was pretty much settled on MarsEdit for much of the time I could not get Ecto to behave correctly with images and attachments. MarsEdit feels just a little more professional, more slick. Setup was almost instantaneous – the application connected to my blog immediately and synchronised the most recent posts, content and categories.
It was immediately easier to use, far more intuitive, and I was posting, and happy with the results, within moments. There’s a lot to be said for an application that just gets on with things.

You need some knowledge of HTML to get the most out of the formatting, but that’s fine for the majority of bloggers who would certainly be accustomed to getting their hands a little dirty.

The Applescript menu is a great addition in my view. One script there, the Google lookup, takes whatever you have selected and performs a standard Google search with it, opening up Safari with the results. I frequently add Google finds into my posts to add interest and give the reader someplace else to explore, so doing this with a single menu selection was a big bonus.

It’s biggest letdown for me is image control. Fine if your image is properly formatted and ready to upload, but let’s be honest, how often is that the case by default? Once I had got Ecto running correctly, it’s powerful image handling was sorely missed in MarsEdit.

I also have an issue with paying money for an application that is still in Beta, particularly when it is already a working, stable app – why is it still rated as Beta?

So what’s the verdict?

The little image at the end of this blog post says it all really.
MarsEdit is a great app, but needs some maturity. I will certainly keep an eye on its development, but it really does have some catching up to do before it can really muscle up to the flexibility and advanced features of Ecto, despite Ecto’s handful of glitches.
Ecto does it for me… for now…

UPDATE 13-12-04: MarsEdit is now out of beta and at version 1.0.

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