I have been looking for a desktop app for blogging recently as I thought my blogging experience can still be improved by using another medium other than the Wordpress web interface itself.

Although Wordpress itself is already a great blogging tool by itself, the thoughts put into designing the interface for blogging has been thoughtful. But one thing I hate about using Wordpress is when I’m handling large amount of images. Let’s say you have 10 images to upload, you have 2 ways to do this, either by uploading the images one by one which is time consuming, or upload all images at once through your FTP client which you have to figure out the direct links to the images later and insert them in your post, still troublesome!

I knew there could be a better way and I was right. Even if I may be late to discover this time saving free desktop app (Mac & PC), I thought I would still share it with anyone here who didn’t know about this sweet little gem yet.

Qumana is a free blogging tool for bloggers as it’s tagline suggests, you can edit blogs that are either self hosted or hosted on Wordpress / Typepad etc itself. Supported blogs are:

• AngelFire
• Blogger / Blogspot
• BlogHarbor
• Blogware
• Bryght
• DiaryLand
• Drupal
• LiveJournal
• MovableType
• MSN Spaces
• Tripod
• TypePad
• Roller
• SquareSpace
• Wordpress.com
• Wordpress.org

Time Saving Features

I don’t want to bog you down with ALL the features of Qumana Blog Editor (you’ll find the feature list at the end of this post), here are some of the thoughtful features that you’ll find extremely useful especially when they are the core functions of blogging:

1) Multiple blogs support

- All your blogs in one interface, no need to visit all your admin pages to create a new post or view/edit all your post.

2) Drag and drop image insertion (the greatest time savers of all time)

- Drag an image into the editor for direct uploading and insertion,

-  and just hit “Upload & Insert” after dragging! If you’re more particular about the placement of your image, you can select a wrapping style, or do an alt tag.

- image will be uploaded to the server and inserted immediately!

3) Quick hyperlinking

- Copy any link from your browser’s address bar, select the text that you want hyperlinked from the blog editor and hit the hyperlink icon at the top,

- your link will immediately appear on the “Link URL” field without having to “Cmd + V”(paste)! Little thoughtful features like this really gives you a greater user experience and saves you lots of time in the long run.

4) Publishing and Pinging

- Once your post is done, hit “Publish Post” and your post will be live! Of course if you want to save your post for future editing, click “Save” and your post will be saved offline.

- Upon clicking “Publish Post”, your post will be automatically “pinged” to the list of sites that you enter in the Preferences.

Full feature list

• PC & Mac
• WYSIWYG editor, as easy as email
• Clean interface with easy-to-understand buttons
• Spell check with ‘as you type’ option
• Insert keyword ads in one click, with preview – make money easily
• Technorati  tagging
• Customize ad design
• Source view option to edit HTML
• Save posts as drafts, or edit old posts, from the Blog Manager
• Easy image uploads and image alignment
• DropPad – gather links, text, and pictures by dragging them to a desktop pad
• Offline editing
• Multi-window editing
• Seamless posting and cross-posting
• Trackback & pinging

Missing features

Tags doesn’t work with Wordpress

I can’t seem to find a way to enter “tags” that works with my Wordpress blog. Although there’s a “Insert Tags” button at the top that lets you insert tags into the post itself, but it doesn’t integrate with Wordpress’s tags system. I have to enter my admin interface to manually insert the tags myself.

Can’t set new window link launching

There’s no option to make my hyperlink launch a new window, unless I edit the html manually in “Source View”.

Other than that, Qumana still serves me well and I will be using it for all my post from now onwards. :)

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Flock 2.0 (Mac & PC) is not only a web browser but it is optimized for your social needs. You can pack all your social services into the browser’s sidebar also known as the “Friend Activity Widget”, tracking them every second while you browse.

RSS feeds are also browsable through the sidebar just by switching tabs.

Social Networking

Social and other services supported by Flock includes MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, Pownce, Delicious, Gmail, YouTube, Wordpress, Photobucket, Blogger, Yahoo Mail, Magnolia, Blogsome, Livejournal, Xanga, Typepad, AOL mail, Picasa and Piczo.

Adding Facebook to the Friend Activity Widget for instance, will enable you to track your Facebook friend’s updates.

Tracking your friend’s updates couldn’t be easier, think of it as a great way to keep your friends close to you at all times.

One of the perks of this concept is the ease in which you share content with your friends, eg. to share a link, image or video that you’ve found while surfing, just drag and drop the media or link into your friends on the left.

Blogging

Not only can you track your friend’s updates and all your RSS feeds (which you can sort them into different folders) on the left side bar, you can also post blog entries using the browser itself, no I don’t mean visiting the blogging site to post entries, Flock features it’s own dedicated blogging editor for your blogging needs.

Posting pictures can also be done via a dedicated photo upload interface, just drag and drop!

Browsing media

Browing photos and videos with Flock is one of the best experience I’ve seen. Just click on the media icon on the sidebar and you’ll be able to search for Flickr photos at the top of the browser. Thumbnails are layed out neatly in a horizontal format, Flickr page will be fetched upon clicking. If you’re a heavy “Flickr searcher” this browser is it!

You can also search Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, YouTube, just to name a few. Very neat and useful integration.

My World

To view all your friend’s updates, RSS feeds, your favourite media (photos & videos) all at once, just click the My World icon on the sidebar. The fastest way to get an all round update of what you’re interested in.

My experience using Flock 2.0

Flock is a promising web browser if you’re a social networking addict. Having Facebook, Twitter and Flickr etc on the sidebar enabling me to check updates in real time is more than I can ask for.

Not mentioning being able to access Delicious bookmarks on the sidebar and dragging links into my Delicious folders directly, which is a plus.

The downside of the browser is that I can’t seem to click on any links on the sidebar that my friends posted, be it Facebook or Twitter. There is also no way to post new tweets or Facebook statuses right from the sidebar itself.

New updates does not invoke Growl notifications unlike Eventbox, though this might not be an issue for some people.

Finally, the browser seems to keep crashing frequently which I suspect is a result of bloating up the browser with too many RSS feeds. That might not be the cause of the crashes but whatever cause it is, it wasn’t a good experience for me at all.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that this issue might just be a one off, and I am sure the developers are still working hard on stabilizing Flock.

A great app in general, Try it for yourself!

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