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It seems that not everyone at Sony is asleep at the wheel – just having a looong lie-in. According to ZDNet,

Sony confirmed on Wednesday that it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players–a major strategy reversal that could help it compete more effectively with rivals such as Apple Computer.

A long overdue awakening to the harsh realities of the world – I can imagine that there’s a strategy battle-royal raging inside Sony right now, with the consumer electronics people watching Apple et al pulling away, and the content lawyers stubbornly insisting that it’s MP3 over their dead bodies. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Sony’s idea of supporting MP3 is the same as yours and mine – no doubt there will be serious internal pressure for some kind of half-arsed DRM scheme. The history of Sony isn’t particularly reassuring – they’re still stubbornly flogging Memory Stick, after all.

But I find the comment about maintaining the ATRAC-only stance at the Sony Connect store interesting. It’s easy to sneer at Sony for doing this, not to mention locking out non-Windows users. But then you have to remember that that’s exactly what Apple are doing with iTunes and AAC – except they have the benefit of selling a device that people actually want.

Ranchero, they of NetNewsWire, have just made a version one beta of their offline blog client available – MarsEdit 1.0. Given that NetNewsWire is the most popular news aggregator for the Mac, it seems logical that MarsEdit is also going to be popular, so I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. Specifically I was whirling it against Ecto, which is the offline client that I currently use.

First impressions are reasonable – it’s a chrome-less Cocoa app which uses a pretty standard layout – if you’re familiar with any other offline client, you’ll be able to find your way around MarsEdit reasonably painlessly. It supports multiple blogs, which are displayed in a drawer on the right, together with a list of previous posting in the main window. Creating a new post, or editing an existing one, brings up a new window, with post options such as categories and comments status in a drawer.

Editing posts

The editing screen is basically an HTML editor – there’s a drop-down list of common tags, and a custom drop-down list where you can add your own. Selecting a tag drops the HTML into the editing window and places the cursor inbetween – so tags are automatically closed. Highlighting a selection of text and inserting a tag places them at each end of the selection. Adding a link pops up a dialog box where you can enter the URL, and if the clipboard contents are a valid URL this is automatically entered for you. Other properties – alt text or target for example – have to entered manually.

Within the main editing screen, there are buttons to select the extended entry, summary or keywords, so you can enter pretty much all the post contents that you’re likely to want. The HTML code is displayed in a contrasting font so it’s obvious what’s HTML and what’s not.

Inserting images is done through a separate option – files can be uploaded and inserted in a single action, although I didn’t test this as it’s not supported by Wordpress.

The preview window gives you an approximation of what the post will look like, although it doesn’t pick up the template from your blog itself. You can enter an approximation of your blog template within MarsEdit itself.

Managing weblogs

There’s a pretty straight-forward dialog to create or edit individual weblog accounts, and MarsEdit attempts to autodiscover the RPC url, although this didn’t work on my Wordpress blog. It supports pretty much all the known blogging engines, plus generic Blogger, Blosoxm and MetaWeblog standards.

Conclusions

It’s not bad for a first attempt, but it’s completely outstripped by the latest version of Ecto in a number of areas. Firstly, there’s no WYSIWYG interface – you edit the posts in HTML, and although you can preview the layout, you can’t edit in the preview screen. Ecto provides a rich text interface, and although it’s not 100% foolproof in the current beta, it’s useful to be able to edit in what-you-see-is-almost-what-you-get mode. I wasn’t able to figure out if MarsEdit will give you a live preview either – although there’s a checkbox on the Preview pane, it didn’t seem to do anything.

Ecto also gives you much greater control over tasks like inserting links – it allows you to edit alt text and target windows for each link, whereas MarsEdit requires this to set globally or manually edited.

Although it’s a perfectly solid application, offline blog clients have moved on – Ecto’s WYSIWYG editing is now setting the standard for functionality. No doubt it will sell well on the back of NetNewsWire’s reputation as a good news aggregator, but for my money the latest version of Ecto is the better package – I’ve not been tempted to change.

To celebrate the fact that my desktop is finally (more or less) sorted out, I thought I’d try and embarrass myself by starting a meme. You can play along at home – just post a picture of your desktop (or wherever else you work) and trackback to this post…