21 April 2008 | Hobbies, Ideas | Suneth Mendis

Last year I started developing an offline blog editor during my free time. It started off as a self learning exercise to learn EditLive! codebase and polish up my long forgotten Java skills. I wrote a few tests, tried out a few APIs and after a few months I managed to come up with a very basic but working blog editor built on top of EditLive! APIs. Being a Java application, it already came with an added advantage of running on multiple platforms.

But my progress sort of stalled after I was moved from tech support to product development. I have been having too much fun working on the new E2 project, I barely have the energy or the time for a side project like this. But the idea of building an offline blog editor still intrigues me. Simply because it is still an untapped market and there is so much potential to grow. As Technorati alone tracks more than 100 million blogs today.

Now that I have no time to develop my home grown editor, I looked for one on the web. I found 2 note-worthy contenders, on the Mac platform. Ecto and MarsEdit. MarsEdit immediately captured my attention with its clean and very Mac-like UI. Ecto has more features but I didn’t really like the general flow of the application. However, Ecto is a few bucks cheaper and has rich text support which MarsEdit doesn’t. In my view MarsEdit seems to be the better software. If somehow MarsEdit can support rich text, it will definitely be the winner! 

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