farfromfearless
Zoundry - the desktop editor for blog authors
One of the great things I liked about my previous sites were the desktop tools that I developed to handle some of the typical tasks like posting news and updating articles. Most of those applications were developed in VB6 and took advantage of some of the nicer features of publishing from the comfort of your desktop. As much as WordPress has grown on me, I still do not find that web-based word processors are comfortable or responsive enough to really be worth using. Once more I’m tempted to break out VS.NET and start developing my own homegrown WordPress desktop publishing tool. Thank god for Google. I ended up doing a quick search online hoping that there would already be something out there that was well-developed enough for me to use on a regular basis and had the flexibility to allow me to mess with my markup if I needed to.
After about an hour of testing out various apps like w.bloggar, BlogJet, WbEditor, I came across an article on Dan Master’s blog (idano): WordPress Desktop Client Search - Zoundry Review. I’m in the process of testing it out right now and in fact this post is written and formatted in Zoundry. So far it seems to work as advertised and I found a couple little pleasant surprises like the preview using your own custom template; saving/storing of unpublished drafts locally (as opposed to WP’s drafts); Post Tagging; and a slew of other nice formatting features. I think the biggest thing for me at this point is the accelerator keys for the different formatting options like creating links or turning existing text into a hyperlink. Even some of the more familiar accelerator keys for bold or italics are available. Little things like that make it much more pleasant to write.
Here are a couple of screenshots if you want to take a look:
I still think I might find myself jumping back into MS Word on occasion for some of my lengthier postings. As I understand it Zoundry is in beta right now; from a UI standpoint it still needs a bit of spit and polish to really make it shine, but the overall ease of use and access to typical functions make it a worthwhile download in my opinion. Give it a whirl!
5 people have left comments
Blog publishing software: Windows Live Writer - Beta–farfromfearless said:
[...] I’ve previewed other blogging clients in the past, and one in particular was quite fun to work with: Zoundry. Admittedly it was a novelty for me and one that I quickly got over. I ended up using WordPress’ editor in the end. It does the job, and with every release there seems to be some small improvements to the User Experience and functionality. Despite these regular tweaks, I’m not completely comfortable editing in a browser. I doubt I’m the only one, but this really comes back to the back that I prefer desktop applications over web-based applications (for a handful of things such as text-editing or word-processing). [...]
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