Ecto is a fully featured desktop blogging client for OS X. It also, apparently, has a Windows version but I haven't touched that so I can't say thing one about it. Ecto's website claims compatibility with Bloger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, WordPress, "and more." I tried Ecto out for a while last night just to see what it did with my MovableType blog.

I found the interface to be mostly clean and intuitive for everything, noting that it maintained a list of posts and categories internally so it could really be self-contained. At the end of my experimentation I came out with only three issues, only one of which I consider serious.

The first, and most greedy, issue is that Ecto is not free. Fair enough, it's a well written piece of software but I truly subscribe to the donationware mentality. Give me a fully featured piece of software and, if I like it enough, I'll pay you. I'd wager at the end of the day this would increase their user base and bring in more money, even if it's less than the suggested donation. But instead they went the shareware route and require registration. It is for that reason that I will not likely bother to use this client after the demo period. Writing my posts in TextEdit or the MovableType built-in interface is really not that big an inconvenience.

The second complaint is a little bit more legitimate as far as a user willing to shell out the cash is concerned. In the compose window found myself looking at two text fields of equal size as well as the field for my entry's title. After a moment's experimentation, I discovered that the top text field was for the body and the bottom was for the extended body. It would be very nice if those were labeled, but once I knew it, well, I knew it.

The third complaint is the substantial one. As you can see by the list on the right of my site, I use hierarchical categories, meaning a category within a category. You'll notice that this entry is in a subcategory. What you also may notice is that I have two subcategories called 'Apple,' one for hardware and one for software. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered Ecto didn't preserve this hierarchy at all. I was faced with a flat alphabetical category list with - you guessed it - two instances of 'Apple' right at the top. How am I to know which is which? That, right there, is enough for me to walk away from the product and not come back until they've repaired it.

All of that being said, this client is very well built and robust. If you're serious about your blogging I think it's worth trying out. To some folks its $17.95 price tag is worth it. To a casual blogger like myself, I'm afraid not.

Update: After contacting Ecto's author(s), I received the following response explaining that the category hierarchy issue is actually a failing in MovableType, not Ecto.

Adriaan wrote: The MovableType XML-RPC API returns categories to ecto as a flat list. ecto never gets to see hierarchies.

see also http://bb.infinite-sushi.com/viewtopic.php?t=372&highlight=hierarchy

Adriaan