I have recently shifted to using a MacBook Air (thanks for the applause, now can you please give me some money so that I can buy some food?) and for the most part, I have not missed the Windows Environment. If anything, I have fallen in love with the Mac. The fact that I was reading Steve Jobs’s biography by Isaacson almost simultaneously had nothing to do with the brandmiration (brand+admiration) that I have recently developed about Apple.
However, one of the things that I DID miss was the Windows Live Writer. Being a (paroxysmally) prolific blogger often left high and dry by my Internet Service Provider, I needed the WLW to help me keep the thoughts alive long enough to transform them into drafts and then into blog posts.
But I started to like writing in WLW so much, that eventually, I was using it to write my blog posts even when I was online. I hardly ever used the wordpress.com interface for this blog or the even worse blogger UI for the blogspot blogs. So naturally, when I shifted to the Mac, I saw this lack of an offline blogging tool as a major put off and my blog writing came down, and then, almost stopped for a while. (No I am not giving lame excuses: this is a legitimate claim!)
So, I started to look for free programs that could take the place of WLW; to no avail.
MarsEdit was the one everyone recommended, but when I weighed the options, the choice of buying food to keep body and soul together won over the choice of getting a fancy software to bolster and already expensive machine. And then, I ran into this program, called the PixelPumper (horrid name for a blog writing tool!).
The focus seems to be on sharing pictures and all, and it lacks one of the biggest advantages of WLW: Live previews of posts. MarsEdit allows previews using some tweaks, but this one is just bare bones.
Anyways, considering the time I spend traveling and without internet access, this tool is something that I needed.
Of course, you shall ask why not use plain old MS Word for the same function; but it has several restrictions and I have never felt comfortable blogging from MS Word. There always have been some bugs and the experience was never very smooth.
PixelPumper seems OK for the time being, though a bug has already cropped up. I cannot seem to be able to add another blog (under the same wordpress.com user ID) to this. There’s this new little blog I have started: Germ Theory. And it just won’t “take” with PixelPumper. Any suggestions?
