The Broken Web Editor

February 29th, 2008

I often explain the benefits of MarsEdit starting with a premise that editing on the desktop beats editing in a web browser. I believe this to be true even when the playing field is level, and web interfaces are operating at their best. Unfortunately, thanks to a large number of ever-changing browser environments, web interfaces frequently don’t operate at their best. This is part of the nature of that beast. Often, web-based editors provide more frustration than convenience.

Recently there has been an increase of new MarsEdit buyers who cite as their motivation a frustration with the WordPress web editor. I respect and admire the WordPress team. In fact, their web interface is among the best out there. But even in the best of circumstances, it’s hard to compete with the usability of a desktop app. And when something goes bad, it becomes downright impossible.

Currently the situation is especially bad for people who use WordPress with Safari. For whatever reason these two pieces of software have fallen slightly out of accord. It’s common to hear tales of people who use Safari for “everything but WordPress.” In short, WordPress has a reputation for messing up or even eliminating parts of your post when using the web-based editor in Safari. I know, because I see the comments of my customers and would-be customers on the web. There is a chorus of confirmation for this problem.

I look forward to WordPress and Safari ironing out their differences. I don’t relish earning customers purely out of frustration with the competition. I prefer to attract customers by exceeding baseline functionality than by my competitors failing to meet it. But if you’re tired of doing battle with the WordPress editor in Safari, or any other browser for that matter, it’s a good time to remember that MarsEdit is here for you.

I welcome those users who arrive out of desperation, and am hopeful they will find much more than baseline functionality to be delighted with in MarsEdit.

Update: Lloyd Budd, who is the quality lead for WordPress, has coincidentally written today on the very subject of Safari and WordPress. He predicts that major improvements are in store with WordPress 2.5:

“With Safari 3 and WordPress 2.5 you should finally have a great experience if Safari is your preferred browser.”

This is great news for everybody. I think your experience will be greater still in MarsEdit, but happy WordPress customers are great for the blogging industry in general.

Update 2: For some reason this post ended up with comments disabled. I don’t know yet if it’s a bug in MarsEdit, WordPress, or the author. I have enabled them, now. I welcome your opinions!

20 Responses to “The Broken Web Editor”

  1. leeg Says:

    For some reason this post ended up with comments disabled. I don”™t know yet if it”™s a bug in MarsEdit, WordPress, or the author.
    Curse those broken blog editors! :-)

  2. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Leeg: haha! Point taken :)

  3. Jochen Wolters Says:

    Daniel,

    this sentence almost deserves its own blog post, nay: own blog, I daresay:

    “But even in the best of circumstances, it”™s hard to compete with the usability of a desktop app.”

    Amen!

    Add to that the privacy issues related to storing data/documents on someone else’s server plus the fact that the ‘Net is not quite as ubiquitous as some folks want to make us believe, and you may wonder where all that irrational hype about Web-based apps in general comes from…

  4. leeg Says:

    Add to that the privacy issues related to storing data/documents on someone else”™s server

    I’m not sure how private your blog posts are, but mine tend to end up on someone else’s server anyway :-)
    that aside, I was actually going to do a longer comment this morning, but couldn’t think of the phrasing. Now I have. I’ve been evaluating MarsEdit for my own blogging for the last couple of weeks, and it’s nice, great usability, but I just can’t see that I have a use for it. My system is almost always connected to the intarwebs even when I’m carting it around, so I don’t often get the situation where the web editor is unavailable. And the blogger editor is good enough for me – it lets me type some HTML in and see what it looks like, which is pretty much what the MarsEdit editor lets me do. So yes, great app, but for me paragraph one of this post doesn’t hold, so the app doesn’t offer that advantage.

  5. Richard Says:

    I think WordPress’s weakness presents a nice opportunity for you Daniel.

    If you could add the capacity to edit WordPress pages and a few other small things there would be little reason for us WP users to use the editor built into WP.

    The other piece would be to allow holding more posts in memory like Ecto does. I don’t use Ecto but when experimenting with it a while back I noticed that it could suck 1000 posts up or, better yet, allow opening an entire category of posts in the app.

    Lastly, maybe a better way to show tags or a hierarchy of categories would enable me to avoid using much of the WP admin UI, which, frankly sucks in any browser.

  6. Steve Kirks Says:

    I’ve been using the WP nightlies from SVN for the last six months or so. Since around the start of February, I’ve seen significant visual and functional changes to the web-based editor page on Safari, much of it positive. The ability to insert media is much easier and prettier but certainly falls short when it comes to usability.

    For example, if you decide in the middle of a weblog post to add a picture, it’s easily done by uploading one from your local machine or from previous uploads. What’s sad is that a previous upload is only accessed from a second page, forcing you to switch back and forth, all the time wondering if your words will disappear.

  7. Riccardo Mori Says:

    I’ve just purchased MarsEdit after taking advantage of the trial period. I have two wordpress-based blogs. My main browsers are Safari and Camino, but before knowing about MarsEdit, I had to use only Camino to write my posts. On Safari everything was messy. For one, simple things as HTML paragraph tags were not respected, and my entries all looked like a monolithic block of text.

    I, too, have constant Web access, but one big advantage when using MarsEdit is that I don’t lose my post if something happens while I’m writing. In the past, at least four times the online WordPress editor ate my (usually long) post before I could publish it. When that happens, it’s gone. No use reloading the page, no use trying the Back button on the browser. With MarsEdit I haven’t lost a word so far. Once I had to cold-reboot my PowerBook and I thought I had lost the entry I was writing, but when I launched MarsEdit afterwards I discovered that it automatically recovers your post in the event of a crash. For me this is a great plus and a great advantage over any Web-based application.

    Cheers,
    Rick

  8. Jochen Wolters Says:

    “I”™m not sure how private your blog posts are”

    I knew someone was going to write that. ;-)

    “My system is almost always connected to the intarwebs even when I”™m carting it around, so I don”™t often get the situation where the web editor is unavailable.”

    Apart from being available even when you’re not connected, there are two more things about MarsEdit that make it a must-have tool, at least for me.

    First, it’s great to have (copies of) your blog posts in a single, easy-to-manage app when writing for several blogs. No need to switch mindsets depending on which blogging platform you’re writing on.

    Second, MarsEdit is 100% Mac-like. There is so much I find lacking about most Web-based UIs, I wouldn’t know where to begin. So, I just love being able to write in an environment (OS X, i.e.) that I thoroughly enjoy working in.

    As you point out, MarsEdit isn’t for everyone. But I’m glad that Daniel’s doing such a fine job with this app for those of us who do prefer the old-fashioned(?) desktop app approach.

  9. Simon Wolf Says:

    Well I set up my first ever WordPress blog on Friday, tried MarsEdit today, emailed a couple of questions and suggestions to Daniel and got really friendly, fast replies and then bought the app. However good the on-line WordPress editor becomes I do prefer a desktop-based editor and since Daniel seems like such a friendly and responsive developer it’s a pleasure to support him.

  10. Dance Says:

    Triggered by leeg, re the basic premise that desktop is better than online:

    In general, I find that the preview pane nature of desktop apps is always more efficient than having to click and wait for a page to load, then go back to the index, etc.

    I find the ability to use easy keyboard shortcuts a big advantage of desktop editors. If the online WP.com editor has a shortcut for insert link, I didn’t find it, and I’m pretty sure cmd-B and cmd-I don’t get me bold and italic. (Actually, I just checked–control-a does work for links, a little slowly, but the designated control-B and control-i are not working for me in Mac Firefox–and while I could learn new shortcuts, I’d rather not.)

    I’m also incapable of preventing my trained fingers from hitting cmd-s every few sentences. That really makes typing anything in the web inefficient for me, and it *really* *really* is not a habit I want to break.

    The trade-off, of course, is that I’m very tied to my own machine to get things done, but that’s not an issue for me.

    I actually use Ecto, though, for the Rich Text editing.

  11. Dan Benjamin Says:

    In my worldview, MarsEdit is the WordPress editor.

  12. pat Says:

    I prefer the MarsEdit interface but Ecto wins over because it has the ability to change the timestamp in WordPress – useful for future posts. Add this and Rich Text editing and MarsEdit will be a winner.

  13. Wolf Says:

    WordPress uses TinyMCE for their editor. Because of javascript issues in Safari 2 this led to the editor breaking alot. The tinyMCE team promises better Safari support in their newest release (TinyMCE 3). I have not had the chance to test the new version, but chances are big the new WordPress (2.5) will use a modified version of the new TinyMCE (3), which will solve a lot of Safari issues, so they say.

    Also, the Webkit team worked hard to solve most javascript issues in the new Safari (3) so I think when the new WordPress comes out, you can safely use Safari 3 with WordPress 2.5 and have a pleasant experience.

    That aside, the Marsedit experience may be better. My workflow for blogposts is write them entirely out, then convert to HTML in Textmate, then copy paste, then fix issues. Not too convenient, but it works for me.

  14. Wolf Says:

    Oh my, I just said the same as Lloyd Budd in the blog post you linked to. Ah well :)

  15. Tim Says:

    What I noticed about Safari 3 is that it adds extra HTML tags from pasted text to keep styles.

  16. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Pat: For what it’s worth MarsEdit also offers the ability to edit the date for future posts. I even blogged about it:

    Future Posting With MarsEdit

  17. Chad Says:

    Thanks for mentioning this. I’ve been experimenting with a WordPress blog and MarsEdit. When I would upload my post using MarsEdit, the paragraph tags would disappear and my post would end up being a jumbled mess!

    So, I tried using the WP editor, and even still it would keep trying to strip out the paragraph tags! Perhaps this is a problem with WP and Safari (or WebKit-based browsers)?

    I’ll have to try using Camino or Firefox and see if this “fixes” my problems, or if it is some other problem. If not that, then perhaps WP 2.5 might be the answer.

  18. donnacha Says:

    With today’s release of an official demo of WP 2.5 RC1, it would be great if you could post about how MarsEdit will cope with the new version.

    Are there any plans to add new features to MarsEdit to take advantage of new features in WP itself?

    It would also be interesting to hear your opinions on 2.5 generally.

  19. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Hi donnacha – I will probably make a point of blogging when 2.5 goes “GM” … I’m really excited it’s finally here. Will definitely eliminate a lot of trouble for MarsEdit users, both on and off the web form.

    I am always considering changes to MarsEdit to take advantage of new WP features. The most asked for is support for editing pages, so that is high on my list.

    Daniel

  20. leeg Says:

    OK, well now I’ve bought MarsEdit, and I’m not ashamed to say that my position has changed since my earlier post and offer an explanation ;-).

    The problem I have which MarsEdit solves is this: when I’m in a web browser, I start surfing the web. I’m doing it now; because I bought ME I had to go to the red-sweater store, and then I was in the browser, so I thought “I know, I’ll go back and comment on that Broken Web Editor post”… undoubtedly I’ll get distracted by something else soon enough too. This is not a problem with the web editor, but is a problem with trying to get something done in the browser context. MarsEdit removes me from that context, so I can see in OmniFocus that I’d decided to make a blog entry, then just fire MarsEdit up to get it written. No distractions, bosh, job done. As I already spend enough time at the computer at work, saving time when I’m using it at home is easily worth $30.

    So, there we go, I make mistakes.

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