Blogspot Blogging-Clients: Qumana And w.bloggar

Since the user interface of blogger.com sucks when it comes to editing larger posts, I looked around for blogging clients (thanks Marcus for the hint).

To let you get an idea of what I mean with "sucks", just look at the preview of this screenshot (no really new information from the full sized version):

I hate applications and sites where the working area is restricted to some extent when I have a 22+ inch monitor in front of me. I want to control the size of my windows and not be restricted by the application! IMHO this is a perfect fail for usability for any application (and there are so many of them out there!). In other words: *grrr*

A second thing that makes editing posts painful with Blogger's Web-UI is working with images. Although there is a nice and functional dialog for inserting (and uploading) pictures from you local harddrive, the problem is that all new pictures are inserted on top of the post. This happens regardless of the current cursor-position or selection. Moreover, it is not possible to move the picture around with drag-and-drop in the editing pane, one has to use cut and paste to shift the picture to the desired position.

A warning

Just in case you're also looking for a free alternative to Blogger's Web-UI, I wrote this post not with one of the tools described below. :(

After some googeling I downloaded two freeware editors to test - Qumana (http://www.qumana.com) and w.bloggar (http://www.wbloggar.com).

Qumana

Positives:

• On startup a wizard-like interface asks me questions about my blog and incorporates all blogs available through one account into it's configuration. A really easy startup.
  
• The application has a really nice and lucid user interface.
• Qumana provides a Quickpad. That is a little window that can reside anywhere on you primary screen (it is not possible to move it to a secondary monitor). By interacting with this little window you can immediately start blogging or managing your blogs. That surely is a nice feature for power-bloggers (with some sort of verbal incontinence).
• Provides for inserting alt-Tags and Titles for images via a dialog.
  

Negatives:

• Qumana does not show posts that are only available as drafts done in the Blogger Web-UI.
• On editing an existing post most of the paragraphs doubled, so that I had to edit the post manually in Blogger's Web-UI afterwards.
• The WYSIWYG text editor does not support common editing shortcuts such as Ctrl+Arrow or Ctrl+Backspace.
• The editor does not support to insert and upload images from my computer. On selecting an image from a local location it displays the images but informs me that it will not be visible in the blog (so what should that be good for?). There is a button labeled "Insert & Upload", but I could not manage to make it enabled.
• Although the Post-Editor window of Qumana has a rather large field "Categories" it does neither show previously used labels nor allows it to add new ones. So, how can I add labels (tags, categories)?
• Upon trying out Qumana I never got the feeling that I'm sure how, when and how good the synchronization between the application's offline store and the blog works. Not a good feeling
  

Conclusion
Because of the many problems with central areas of blogging, Qumana is not really an option for me.

w.bloggar

Negatives:

• Startup under Windows Vista seems not to work for about one minute, but then, the first window shows up.
• In blog-settings wizard (or what the wizard at first startup is called) it is not possible to move between the textboxes for username and password via the tab-key. OMG!
• When viewing the recent posts of a blog, the friendly application shows me a list of - stand still - Blog-IDs and timestamps, but no blog title! I have to use the preview-window to determine from the HTML of the blog what post it is. How can one do something like that? See yourself:
  
• w.bloggar provides just a HTML-editor with syntax-highlighting and a preview-tab. There is no WYSIWYG-editing. That may be not the worst, but is not the thing I'm looking for.
• w.bloggar seems to totally ignore the titles of posts. Even on creating a new post I found no way to edit the title - it always remained "<>".
• Even worse, when I tried to post a one-word test-post I got a NullReferenceException. Oh no, what a piece of software!
  
• So, that's enough, I quit on that tool!
  

Conclusion
Due to the missing of basic features, I have no animo left to use this tool.

Resúmé

Both tools tested lack of basic features, so I'll contritely stick on Blogger's Web-UI. It's not that bad, as I thought! :)

Do -->you<-- know a better alternative for blogging on Blogger?