Ecto 3 Hello World Post
I’ve been following Adriaan Tijse… Adrian Tissel… Ado’s Twitterstream for awhile eagerly looking forward to the latest version of Ecto, my favorite desktop blogging software. Version two’s been relatively unchanged for a couple of years now with an update last year to provide Intel support and some new toolbar icons at some point before that. I was happy to see that Version 3 is available for download in Beta form and decided to give it a whirl.
Pictured is my entry into the Build your own Rock Album meme on flickr (672 images and growing!). Image pasted using the new and kind of awesome Flickr Helper tool in Ecto 3. It’s still a bit new with some missing features, but I’m looking forward to it’s completion. Its sibling, the Amazon helper looks similarly awesome and should be a bit easier to figure out for first-time users than the previous version’s Amazon tool.
There are a few rough edges. There was no ability (that I could find) to import Ecto 2’s settings forcing me to enter my login info and Amazon affiliate id. One of my earlier posts here was displayed in the preview using center alignment for the text after an inline image (we’ll see if this one does the same), even though the tag was closed. But hey, it’s Beta software and software is Hard, right?
Some new welcome features: Editing post in an external editor (options include, BBEdit, TextWrangler, SubEthaEdit, and my personal fave, TextMate). Also, links can now be created using a “URL from clipboard” context menu, eliminating the need for an extra dialog. Nice (but how ’bout a shortcut?). Also, I understand this is a complete rewrite, so I’m sure there are many more improvements under the covers.
I look forward to writing more with this app in the coming days. Mad props to Adriaan for his hard work.
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