mahiwaga

In addition to stealing my sister’s MacBook, I’ve also taken her old phone, and so I’ve installed a blogging client on it, which I am testing right now against Mephisto.

So far, I’ve tried three desktop blogging clients for Mac OS X: Journler, MarsEdit, and Ecto.

As I noted before, Journler is free-as-in-beer, although not free-as-in-speech. It looks nice enough, but unfortunately, it can’t connect to Mephisto for some reason. Alas, that makes it pretty unusable, but it’s likely an idiosyncrasy of Mephisto. I guess I could try it against another blog engine, but since my main blog is running on Mephisto right now, it’ll have to be some other day.

MarsEdit looks rather nice as well, with a sparse, functional interface that doesn’t get in the way, reminiscent of older versions of OS X’s Mail.app. I succeeded with connecting to Mephisto via the MetaWebLog API (apparently for Mephisto, you have to use your user name as the blog ID.) My only quibble is with the fact that the timestamps are all screwed up, which is apparently more a problem with Rails, rather than with Mephisto or MarsEdit, but which apparently does not have an elegant solution at this time other than manually screwing with the timestamp. Because MarsEdit doesn’t let you munge the timestamp, I am rather left with editing the timestamp via Mephisto’s admin pages, which sort of defeats the point of using a desktop blog client. MarsEdit costs $24.95, but they offer a time-limited but otherwise full-featured trial for free.

ecto is another desktop blogging client which is actually available for both Mac OS X and Windows. In terms of aesthetics, I feel like the interface is a little cluttered and the icons don’t feel Aqua-like, but rather Swing-like, although I’m pretty sure that it’s not actually a Java app. (It looks like Carbon to me, but what do I know?) Again, connecting to Mephisto via the MetaWebLog API was pretty painless. It looks like timestamps actually work properly, but I’m not holding my breath. At least ecto lets you manually change the timestamp if need be.

Lastly, I also downloaded a blogging client for my cel phone. Up until last Saturday, I had a Nokia 6102i which I thought worked rather well. I had it for a year. It’s nice and compact, and it has pretty decent reception. It also had Bluetooth which let me easily sync to my Mac, and it also had J2ME MIDP 2.0, which let me run various useful apps, including the mobile version of Opera, and the Gmail mobile client. And it let me run Kablog, which is a blog client that runs on Symbian OS and on J2ME M IDP 2.0 compatible handsets. Unfortunately, photo blogging doesn’t work on the Nokia 6102i.

However, I stupidly lost my phone, which proved quite frustrating. Not only did I have a few pictures on the phone which I had failed to transfer, but I hadn’t sync’ed my contacts for a long while. Luckily, I had an old crappy Sony Ericsson Z500a, which was my phone previous to the Nokia. (It’s actually a pretty decent phone as well, with probably better reception than the Nokia but (1) it doesn’t have Bluetooth and (2) for some reason, mine kept randomly turning off regardless of whether or not the battery was charged.

I eventually went home to my parents’ house, and managed to scavenge a Motorola SLVR L7 that my sister had recently abandoned. While it’s relatively thin, its other dimensions are larger than the Nokia’s, and in the few days I’ve been carrying it around, I’ve managed to badly scratch the screen already (one of the reasons why I’ve preferred clamshells.) Kablog works fine on it (once I figured out how to manually set up Internet-access) although Mephisto initially gave me some problems. (When I moblogged on the Nokia, I was running Wordpress.) The SLVR does, however, have far more memory than the Nokia. (I kept running into out-of-memory issues with the Nokia, making the SLVR feel absolutely capacious.) I have yet to re-install any of the other apps I’ve used. My will to moblog has somewhat slackened. Mostly because I feel like there’s always a notebook or even desktop around. Clearly, I have no life.

I’m probably going to continue using ecto for now, and decide later whether or not I want to continue using it enough to pay $17.95 for it. It may be very well worth it, but we’ll see. There’s still the option of writing my own blog client. In theory it sounds like it should be easier than actually designing a blog-engine (which was my last abandoned project.) The only thing is that I don’t know anything about Objective C, and neither do I know anything about the MetaWeblog API, so this could prove quite challenging. (Is there a way to write a Cocoa app in perl or Ruby?)