EdTechTrek

MarsEdit is a tool that I discovered not long ago and I have really come to love it. So I decided that I would share it here. Here is a great (and simple) blogging tool that runs locally on your computer (OS X) and allows you to compose blog posts off-line and upload them to most major blogging services when you want.

It has great editing features for both text as well as media and could not be easier to use. The editing features are great and it also allows you to work with the full menu of media resources. Built-in text markup options are great.

Once you are ready to publish specific blogging drafts, all you have to do is publish. What I really like about this it that it allows me to work on draft posts without having to be connected. I know, except for the network necessity, all of this is feasible without a program like this one. I don’t know what it is, but I prefer it to posting live. It is more like writing your post in a word processor, then cutting and pasting into a new blog post… minus the cutting/pasting. It also allows you to easily edit and republish a post - great for those times when you see that glaring typo or think of some critical angle or detail that you forgot to include. It also works with Flickr if you have photos there. It does have a number of advantages that I have come to love.

For those of you who are mac users and have upgraded to the latest OS, Leopard, you have most probably been enjoying the built in quicklook feature that allows you to preview almost any document simply be selecting it and pressing the space bar. I think it just might be one of my favorite features because it allows me to browse through files without ever having to open them, including photos and videos! The only underdeveloped feature is when using QuickLook to view a folder rather than a specific file. The result was not all that informative. Well, there is a 3rd party plugin that you can download for free that really improves this functionality when viewing folders. You can download it here. After installing it (very easy to do), the result is this. You get to preview the file names inside of that folder, including timestamp, date modified, file size, and file type. This is a huge timesaver for me as I graze though files, and now folders, looking for that bit of information that I have saved… somewhere. By the way, if you are interested, there is also a QuickLook plugin for .ZIP files that allow you to preview these same bits of information in a .zip file without having to uncompress it. Anything like this that helps me manage my information is great. As storage gets cheaper we are having larger and larger hard drives that allow us to be real digital pack rats. These types of features, along with Mac’s great Spotlight search engine, make finding my precious bits, bytes, megabytes, and now gigabytes all that much easier.