I’m writing this review in the new blog editor, Blogo. There’s a lot to like about Blogo. It has one of the easiest to use interfaces I’ve seen, and I’ve reviewed a lot of programs. For a blogger looking to move from website based editing it has a lot to offer.

Blogo looks a bit like a new Adobe program. The interface is done in shades of gray. Buttons all have a soft gradient look that makes them seem like they have texture. While the buttons are not labeled, they do have descriptive pop-ups that appear when you mouse over a button. Since the functions of most buttons are immediately obvious and there are few of them, the lack of labels is not a problem.

Blogo Editor Interface

The basics are all included. You get about the same editing functions that you’d find in Blogger or a basic Wordpress editing window. And everything makes sense. I’ve seen few applications that are as immediately obvious and easy to use. There is also a pretty inclusive manual for the program available through the Help menu.

Adding an image is as easy as dropping it onto a drop box in the main editing window. If you want it to link to a full sized image, there’s a checkbox for that. You can also crop an image right in the program. Blogo adds an image thumbnail by default. I couldn’t find the ability to change the default thumbnail size in the preferences but you can change both a thumbnail size and the larger image size manually but changing the pixel dimensions. That’s not a drag a handle and resize operation but it’s straightforward. You can add multiple images to each blog entry and align them left, right or centered in their own paragraphs.

There doesn’t seem to be an option to add alternate text to an image and the editing display drops a placeholder into the page for each image. To see the actual image you need to click on the placeholder icon and look in the image edit frame. Still, working with images in Blogo is pretty straightforward if you can live without the accessibility and SEO advantages of alternate text and image descriptions.

One little extra that I appreciate is a display that counts words and characters in a post as you type. Have a two hundred word limit? End after the word two in the previous sentence. It’s also straightforward to assign categories and keywords to a post, though you have to do so one category at a time.

Another nice extra is the ability to assign custom templates to blogs that make the previews actually look like your eventual post page. Excellent.

Blogo makes it easy to connect to most blogging programs and allows for multiple accounts. An obvious dropdown menu makes it easy to post to different blogs. Want to edit a prior post? There’s a slide out drawer that makes the last 10 entries one click away from editing.

Blogo is a pretty good version one program. Its design is extremely well thought out and easy to use. It does lack a few features that I’m not willing to live without. The inability to add alternate text to an image is one. Another is the lack of find or search and replace in the editor. That’s really not excusable in a modern program.

I also find the rich text editing features too limiting. Specifically I want to see the inclusion of headings in editing menu. That is another SEO friendly option that I consider essential. I also find that the HTML that Blogo writes is a bit verbose. Every paragraph tag gets written with style”clear: both;”. If you have a site built with floating elements, as this one is, that can ruin the layout. I had to drop the text into BBEdit to remove the offending inline styles.

, which is not necessary or always desired. Combined with the lack of search and replace, that makes the extra markup unavoidable. That’s probably a trivial consideration for the average blogger but not something I appreciate.

Blogo is an easy to use program that I would recommend to non-pro bloggers looking to use a desktop application for blogging. It covers the basics well and has a brilliant, easy to use interface. The lack of advanced features won’t lure me away from my current program, Ecto.

Rating:
Ease of use: 5
Features: 4
Value: 3

Viewing PDF files is easy on a modern Mac. By default you just double click on the file and Preview will open it up. There is no need to use anything else, though some people who got in the habit of using Adobe Reader (Adobe Acrobat Reader in older incarnations) will download that from the Adobe website. You might prefer the way it looks but Adobe Reader is slower in opening and viewing files than Preview.

There are some reasons to have a copy of Reader, It is better suited to filling our PDF forms and works in conferencing situations that use Adobe Acrobat Connect. I have maybe filled out two PDF forms in the last three years. Reader makes accessing documents that incorporate accessibility features for the vision impaired possible in a way that other PDF viewers don’t, as well as offering some security features you won’t find elsewhere. If you have any of these special needs, Adobe Reader is the best choice. For everyday use I never open my copy.

There are other PDF viewer options. One I particularly like is Skim . What makes the Skim PDF reader more useful than other options? I’m glad you asked. The list of features it offers is pretty long but there are a few that I particularly like.

Bookmarks.

As more and more documentation is created in PDF format we often end up dealing with long manuals, even e-books. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to save your place and come back to it later? Not a problem with Skim. Set a bookmark, title it so you know what your are bookmarking when you come back to it.

Notes

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to add notes to a page you are reading? As PDFs are read only documents, that isn’t easy. Well, yes it is with Skim. Click on a page you want to annotate and a yellow box pops up. Start typing and you have a note. Skim lists notes in a sidebar with page location.

Highlighting – Circling

You don’t want to go to the trouble of making a note but you still want to call out a part of a page for later attention. Skim makes it easy to add the digital equivalent of a yellow marker to any selected text. Want to call attention to a graphic on a page? Adding a circle (or box) around it is just as easy. Strikethroughs, lines and underlines are all there too. With Adobe Reader you can add notes or markup if the original author sets the document up that way, in other words, sometimes.

Remembering Passwords

E-books and special documents sometimes come password protected. Remembering passwords and manually typing them in each time I open a PDF is annoying. With Skim that isn’t necessary. It connects with Keychain to store passwords. Enter them in once, check the remember in Keychain box and forget about them.

Full Screen View

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to remove distractions while reading. Skim has a full screen view feature that hides everything but the page you are reading. Nice.

Magnifying Glass

Another handy feature Skim offers is the Magnifying Glass Tool. Click on it in the Tool Bar then click on a section of the page and it instantly magnifies. Move the tool around and the section you are magnifying moves too.

Other Features

Skim is feature rich and has a number of other features that set it apart from simple PDF readers like Preview and Reader. Some of them like AppleScript and LaTeX support are only for the technical user, but presentations, a reading bar and the ability to export notes are useful for the rest of us.

Considerations

Skim is a bit slow compared to Preview but does display as quickly as Adobe Reader on my iBook. Both are fast on my new Intel iMac, but that has 4GB of RAM installed. Documentation is pretty good and available through the help menu but it isn’t as detailed as I’d like.

So far Skim has been stable for me and is now my default PDF reader. Give it a try. It’s free. http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/

Recommended

Here’s a great list of web based resources that any web designer should find useful. Some are services, some free, some not. Some, like Wordpress, are applications. They all look interesting. Whether I’m better served by an application on my Mac rather than a web one is an interesting question but still, its worth checking out The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need.

Keynote I’m totally sold on already. I have to start creating presentations for a series of classes in a couple of weeks and am looking forward to doing so in Keynote. As for Numbers, I just haven’t needed to work on a spreadsheet. I’ll need to do that also in the next week or so I’ll have a chance to kick the tires there also.

So, on to Pages. To say that I was underwhelmed by the last version would be putting it mildly. The idea of an integrated and inexpensive writing and page layout program is very attractive but Pages was sort of a bastard hybrid that did neither in an elegant say. I never used it for writing or editing, only for page layout. It was okay for that, reasonably capable and reasonably easy to use. Not the best either way but an adequate compromise. It wasn’t a everyday program but something that I pulled out occasionally. I do end up writing pretty much every day, just not with Pages.

I’m happy to say that may change. Apple must have realized that the Pages paradigm wasn’t working because they split the page layout and writing functions into separate, well I’m not quite sure what to call them; Apple uses the term modes. They could have just as easily split the program into two, one a word processor and one a page layout program. The screens and experiences are different enough to justify that decision.

The page layout mode is basically the old Pages. There are some tweaks and extra templates but changes are pretty minor. What’s new is the writing mode, and that’s what has me re-examining my bias against Pages and that’s what I’ll be describing. The short of the matter is that I like it. A lot.

Obviously anything made by Apple will look polished and Pages does. And it’s fast. I opened a website proposal that I had started in Word as my first trial document. The difference in speed was noticeable. And this was on a g5 iMac and Word v.X, not running Rosetta on an Intel machine. Pages opened quickly, ran quickly and scrolled quickly, even on a 120 page document (not the proposal). Now going back to Word is annoying. Maybe the new version of Word coming out next year, running Intel native will be faster but for now, no. I’ve ordered a new iMac and iWork, so I’m looking forward to even a bit more speed out of Pages next week.

Beyond the speed, I’m enjoying the uncluttered interface. Word allows for very fine grained toolbar customization, so my version displays only what I want it to. What I found interesting is that the default Pages toolbar is almost exactly what I had set up in Word. I guess my needs are pretty standard. But the Word toolbar now looks dated to me and a bit amateur, sort of the way that PowerPoint templates look amateur after using Keynote. But that’s probably not fair comparing a brand new program to one that came out five or six years ago.

Opening Word documents with Pages is straightforward. I’ve run 10 pretty heavily formatted Word files through Pages and had minor formatting errors on about half of them. But I have the same problem opening some of my old Word 98 files and documents sent from Windows. All in all, import and exporting Word files is straightforward. But it is importing and exporting, not simply opening and saving documents. If I had to send files back and forth a lot I might find that a bit annoyance. Whether that annoyance is greater than the experience of using a slower Word is something I’ll have to see about.

Beyond the formatting issue, Pages actually improves on Word’s experience of tracking changes. Instead of hard to read pop up change notes, Pages displays them in a side column. Word changes seem to be imported and exported accurately, so sharing a group edited document works well. I find it hard to express how much I like the side column approach. The side column is not just for change tracking. It also adds the ability to write notes attached to words or characters in a page. Notes are always visible but out of the way. You can print them or not when printing or exporting to PDF. It’s one of those touches that seems so right and obvious that I wonder why everybody doesn’t do it. Jer’s Novel Writer is the only program I’ve used that offers this touch. Words sticky type notes, modal dialog boxes and side sheets all work but don’t work nearly as well.

Not an Office Killer

Most of the standard word processor features seem to be included but if you are a Word power user you won’t feel any threat from Pages. There is no macro ability. Mail merge works beautifully from Address Book but not from any other source. If someone sends you a spreadsheet of addresses you will need to import that into address book to do a mail merge, unlike Word which can use Excel as a mail merge source. One lack I find strange is the inability to get live updates from Numbers spreadsheet that have been place into Pages. If I remember correctly, even Appleworks did that. If you create a data table in Numbers and place it in Pages, it works beautifully. If you update the date in Numbers you need to re-import the table into Pages. The updates are not transferred. Tables created in Pages have some basic number crunching ability but, while useful, that’s not the same thing.

If you are doing technical writing you will probably want to look elsewhere. Pages does basic footnotes but doesn’t seem to do endnotes. And it doesn’t integrate with Endnote. If you write academic or scientific papers you would be better served with Word or Mellel or the new Nisus Writer Pro.

Search and replace are adequate but basic. Searches and find and replace work as you’d expect. It looks like Pages uses the same find functionality built into TextEdit. You can search by whole or partial word and make the search case sensitive or not. Niceties like regex search included in Mellel or Nissus Writer, along with similarity search, saved searches and batch searches seem to be missing.

Pages also doesn’t seem to offer indexing, cross referencing or line numbers. But honestly, how often does the average user need these features? Pages is not a tool designed for the technical writer or corporate document creator, nor at its price point would I expect it to be.

$So What?

Pages does not do what some other programs can. What is does do, it does beautifully. It shines at page layout. It make document formatting easy. It offers a nice working environment. It is user friendly and has some beautiful templates included. In other words, Pages is an excellent choice for the typical home or SOHO user.

As a web designer I want the most capable software for my work. As a small business person I need the ability to write letters, reports and proposals. With Pages I have all that I need. I can create standard business documents and beautiful ones at that. Pages integrates with other Apple programs like iPhoto and Address Book, though to be honest so do most other Mac writing programs. I foresee that Pages will become my default word processor. I’ll still keep Word around for those times when I need capabilities that Pages can’t offer. I doubt that will more than a couple of times a month. I’ll still do my coding in a dedicated program, http://barebones.com”BBEdit. I’ll continue with my attempt at a novel in the brilliant writing tool, Scrivner, but I’ll move the chapters into Pages for editing. I love Pages’ revisions and notes implementation.

Conclusion

Could I do all my writing, editing and document creation in one program, say Word? Sure. Could I do my work as quickly? No. Could I produce as beautiful formatted marketing brochure or newsletter? Probably, though with a lot more effort. Am I a convert to Pages? Absolutely.

Value: 5

Ease of Use: 5
Documentation: 4
Features: 4
Macness: 5
Highly recommended

A job that small shop web designers often have to do that isn’t talked about much is creating documentation. Sometimes we have to do so to support our clients in using the features we set up for them. Sometimes we have to document problems when submitting a tech support help ticket. Either way, writing and illustrating procedures in an easy-to-understand way is not easy or quick. Until now.

Well, it still may not be a lot of fun but it got a whole lot easier with the introduction of ScreenSteps, a program that makes taking screen shots and creating documentation about as simple as it can get. It doesn’t seem that hard to do it the old way. Take a screen shot (Cmd + Shift 4), resize the image then insert it into the document. I used to use TextEdit. That’s used to. I’m not going back. (hopefully)

After downloading the demo, then following the very short “Getting Started” tutorial, I was ready to go. A client had called in the morning wanting me to come to her office and demonstrate how to add new addresses to her ConstantContact mailing list program.

Now, Constant Contact provides lots of very good documentation, including how-to movies. The problem may be that there is too much there and the client couldn’t navigate the sea of choices. Whatever. I added three new contacts she emailed me, using ScreenSteps to take screen shots as I went along. (Cmd + Shift + Ctr + 4). Now that’s an awkward keyboard chord but that can be changed.

ScreenSteps took the screenshots as I captured them, giving me an opportunity to crop the shots and add highlights to the image to direct focus to the important parts of the screen. It did this unobtrusively and arranged the shots in order as I continued the address adding process.

When I was done, I went back and annotated the steps. With a screen shot for each step there wasn’t a lot of writing left to do.

Click a button to export the project to PDF and it was ready to email. The client was able to add two more addresses herself.

This is one of those why didn’t somebody think of this before kinds of programs, easy to use and figure out. No bloat, no learning curve. Instant productivity gains. What more could you want?

Quite a bit actually. The software is pokey, very pokey when I re-opened the file to play with the HTML export function. The export went just fine and produced nice clean code. But opening the file tool over a minute on a 2 GHZ G5 iMac with 1 GB of ram. That’s slow. A couple of screen captures had a lag time too.

After saving the file again then going back to re-edit an image, ScreenSnap failed to export my new version. Not cool. Also the first time through, the program crashed on me. Still, I called the boss and asked him to buy a copy. I tried making 2 more quick tutorials and had no problems.

The PDF was pretty basic looking, but the HTML export was very nice. As ScreenSteps allows me to use custom HTML export templates, that part shows a lot of promise. There are workarounds for the clunky PDF exports by using the HTML, styling it copying the finished pages from Safari into TextEdit. Not quite instant RTF but not a horrible inconvience. Since I’m mostly interested in web based documentation this is reasonable.
Editing features are very basic. No font choices, no text resizing, though in the HTML export that’s not a problem for web pages as the program creates good clean code with an external style sheet. There may be a way to adjust how the PDF’s display text out but it wasn’t immediately obvious. On the plus side you can add hyperlinks to text or images.

Images are automatically resized to fit one of two built in page styles. Both worked. I’d like a couple more, but that’s quibbling. I would also love the ability to embed a thumbnail in the web page with a larger image that would pop up with a click.

If you need to crank out how-to’s or other documentation that incorporates screen captures, this tool can save you a lot of time and effort. If you don’t, the $40 price is a bit high to pay for a one trick program that won’t export to RTF or other editable desktop formats.

ScreenSteps http://www.bluemangolearning.com/products/screensteps/ $39.95

Ease of use: 5
Features: 3
Value: 4
Documentation: 4
Stability: 3
Recommended with reservations. For web based how-to’s ScreenSteps looks very good. For desktop published PDF’s the output is primitive. Though for quick and dirty documentation, nothing comes close to the speed and ease of workflow. As with many version 1.0 releases, you might want to wait until some of the bugs are ironed out before making the purchase.

1. My number one reason is speed. Even with the cable connection I have, desktop software is still faster than working on the server.
2. Close behind that is the ease of using a program that takes full advantages of the Mac OS. (there is a windows version of Ecto but I’ve never tried it)
3. A web page text area is not as nice an editing environment

The first reason can be offer small benefits if your connection is extra fast but for most of us the difference will be noticeable. Number two is where we start to see the real benefits. Ecto is a Mac program with the benefits of an application that is well integrated with the operating system.

Want to add a photo? Click the iPhoto button.

Or choose click a button on the bottom of the window or choose Add Attachment from the Draft Menu. Easy enough.

It is the ability to add and format images that sells me on Ecto. It will insert thumbnails with links to the larger version or inline images. It even has the ability to resize and web optimize images directly without needing to run them through an external editing program like Photoshop or GraphicConverter. You can also set the image alignment quickly and easily. All this is much simpler and much, much faster than adding images with any JavaScript based

Ecto also allows you to insert Quicktime movies with several display options. Again, this process works more simply and quickly than trying to do this in any online blog editing I’ve seen.

Ecto offers two text formatting options, Rich Text and HTML. If you don’t want to mess around with HTML and still want to add basic formatting, pretend that Ecto is Mail or TextEdit. Just make your text bold or italic or colored or whatever. You can change font size or family – observing the normal cautions about web fonts. Simply, you can style your blog posts without worrying about knowing HTML.

Or, if you are interested in semantic markup, Ecto makes HTML editing easy. You can specify custom keyboard shortcuts that will insert any tag sets you want, making Ecto an excellent and fast HTML editor. This gives cleaner code, without inline style attributes and allows you to add heading attributes to headings instead of simply large, bold bits of text. This is beneficial for search engine optimization and accessibility for screen readers. It also appeals the to code purist in me.

Let’s see, easy image and media insertion, faster editing, automatic text formatting, if you want it, or keyboard HTML insertion if you don’t, what else is there to like? Actually quite a bit. Ecto is a Cocoa based OS X program with all the benefits that entails. It uses the built in OS X dictionary, thesaurus and spell checker. There is even a word count feature. All of which make writing easier.

There is a built in preview. That means you don’t have to save an entry, then reopen it to edit text or check image alignment. Ecto access OS X services, connecting it to other Mac programs. I use the HumaneTextService to write my entries using Markdown and auto-format them with a click. Ecto will even validate my HTML.

As with any mature program, the list of features goes on and on but this covers the highlights. I’m using Wordpress for my blogs and Ecto takes advantage of the extra features that an advanced blog application like Wordpress or Movable Type offers. But it works with online services like Blogger, too.

Connecting to your blog is straightforward. Give Ecto your blog address and it usually auto-discovers the connection script. Enter your username and password and you should be set to go. You can have as many blogs as you want.

Documentation is very good, too, as is tech support. This is shareware with a 14 day free, full featured trial.

Ecto http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/
$17.95 U.S.

Ease of Use: 4
Features: 5
Documentation: 5
Value: 5

Highly Recommended

At version 8.5 BBEdit offers quite a surprise, too. The interface has been extensively modified and simplified for both the application and its preferences. For most programs a mention of changed preferences would be a bit silly, but as BBEdit has such an extensive preference set that its preference panel can actually be considered a part of its everyday operation.

Why the new version is numbered 8.5 instead of 9, up from 8.2 is a mystery. Bare Bones offered a .5 upgrade once before when BBEdit was made OS X native. That made sense. That was an important code porting effort but version 6.5 of BBEdit didn’t have a lot of new features over the old 6.

This update is a totally different animal. Besides an interface makeover, BBEdit added some welcome new features. The two most immediately obvious are code folding and menu bar customization.

Code folding, long a selling point for BBEdit’s main competitor TextMate and included with the latest version of Dreamweaver, is great. Toggle a little triangle and blocks of code fold up to un-clutter the workspace. Besides cleaning up a full page of code, the folding feature makes it easy to find closing tags and brackets, or the lack thereof. Its inclusion in BBEdit marks some serious catching up in an essential feature.

The other obvious change is in BBEdit’s new ability to toggle menu bar items. Use subversion or CVS a lot? Switch on a menu list and have it right there for you. Clippings, previously Glossary now has its own menu, which makes it easy to assign keystrokes to invoke commonly used snippets of text or code. Clippings are now easier to access and edit, too. As with most features in BBEdit, these are language sensitive.

Speaking of languages, BBEdit now offers syntax highlighting for Ruby, SQL and YAML. These were available as plugins before but it’s nice to see them incorporated into the core program. Bare Bones is now on the Ruby bandwagon, a place where TextMate has been the main Mac contender.

BBEdit’s already superior search functions have been improved too, adding PCRE and the ability to search and edit .gz files. It offers better JavaScript support, too, though I haven’t had an opportunity to use it yet. I have glanced at the excellent documentation and am looking forward to doing so.

Bare Bones claims almost 200 improvements and new features for BBEdit 8.5. The few I understand had me on the phone within an hour of downloading the demo to purchase my upgrade. Bare Bones forgot to update their shopping cart to include the new version and announce prices. That’s been taken care of but how embarrassing.

This is a major and badly needed update to a fine program that was falling behind in modern features. It has me back firmly in the BBEdit camp.