Finally, a Mac Blogging App to Rival Windows Live Writer

I don’t miss many things since switching to Apple computers nearly 2 years. Actually, to be fair there’s only on thing I do miss: Windows Live Writer, arguably the best piece of software ever created by Microsoft.

Live Writer is a blogging client that makes blogging easy, from image handling, through to text, and it has most of the bases covered. I’ve never been able to find a Mac blogging client that comes close, and running Live Writer through a virtual machine isn’t worth the effort.

Then I tried Blogo.

Finally I’ve found something that rivals Live Writer.

The Blogo package has been around for a while, but it wasn’t until a post at Mashable had I heard of it. The software isn’t free, but with a 21 day free trial then $25 for a license it’s not unreasonable either.

The biggest different between Blogo and other Mac apps is simply ease of use. The window (pictured above) looks like a Wordprocessor, and is simple to use, with spell check built in. Features such as pre-posting are included alongside a native preview tool that allows for quick previews without the need to hit the blog itself.

Where it delivers bucketloads of WIN, like Live Writer is with image handling. The mistake many blogging tools make with images is serving images up in a post served from the source, instead of being uploaded to the blog itself. Blogo uploads images, and adding an image is a simple drag and drop process. Image handling also comes with basic cropping/ editing as well, so you can resize or crop an image before it’s uploaded. The image tools aren’t as rich as Live Writer, but they are a cut above the rest.

Like any platform though it’s not perfect. Blogo insists on inserting paragraph tags into the post, a minor issue but something you can’t switch off. Image alignment is problematic, with Blogo not using or picking up WordPress alignment options, so there’s no CSS alignment (in my case, it was a fight to simply center an image); it also starts to do strange things when you try to force centering, such as not uploading the image (in the end I had to go into WordPress to do the image in this post).Blogo also doesn’t support alt or title tags with images, so although you can add these manually, it would have been nicer to see them in the package.

This is my first post using Blogo, so I can’t say for sure yet whether I’ll continue to use it, but image issues aside it’s a highly appealing package and will no doubt win friends among Mac users, particularly new Mac users who are looking for a Live Writer substitute.