ecto for Windows Still Blows
December 1, 2005
Alex, the lead developer for ecto for Windows, has commented a few times on my ecto for Windows Blows post. I figured they’ve been through a few versions and it was time for me to give them another shot. Alex seems to be putting a lot of care into the product, and as a developer myself, I know how frustrating it can be to get either useful feedback or overly generalized complaints (a la something “blows”). I hadn’t looked at it since August, so why not.
I downloaded it again. Which itself was somewhat difficult. Have you Google searched “ecto windows” lately? The first promising link is misleading as it leads to an old version (1.0.3) which in itself has a link to a broken download. Anyway, I found my way to the homepage and grabbed 1.8.7
On first glance, I’m not satisfied with the spell check, I’d prefer if it checked constantly, sorta Word style. Also, a quick trial on the new keyword feature didn’t actually work, but that is likely because of Wordpress not explicitly supporting it, not necessarily their fault. Another annoyance at this point is that the ping action threw me a non-descript error about “Internal Server Error” no clue why, or how to fix… One last comment, a lot of my posts have relative links to images in the posts. Anyway these could be rewritten to take account of my blogs hostname so they don’t all show broken? On that note, why do none of these previews use my site’s template somehow? Maybe that’s configurable and I just didn’t look deep enough.
Oh crap, I just noticed a final straw to break the camel’s back. My posts in the system that are drafts are showing up in ecto as “Published”. That won’t fly.
I guess I still can’t commit to using ecto for windows (in fact I’m not using it on the mac anymore either) The built in Wordpress interface is simple, and for now that continues to win. Truthfully many of the problems I’m experiencing may be attributed more to Wordpress or the underlying APIs, but either way I still can’t use the product. Nor will I be recommending it on campus as we roll out potentially 30,000 blogs…
Tags: api, apis, blog, blogging, blogs, desktop blogging, ecto, google, movabletype api, review, software review, windows, wordpress
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6 Responses to “ecto for Windows Still Blows”
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Thank you for the new post. Indeed all of your issues are API related, with the exception of two thing. First, the Ping error which is due to the ping server returning the error but ecto is not showing a helpful error message. Second, the relative path issue may be a bug in the preview window so I will take a look into that. And you can customize your preview template to use your blog’s in the Options->Preview Template section.
None of the APIs return the post status (published or draft) to the client so there is no way ecto (or any desktop clients) can figure out.
The spellchecker has been vastly enhanced in the upcoming v2 of ecto, with check-as-you-type spellchecking and WYSIWYG editing.
Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!
thank you
this page really sucks!!! i cant download things!!!when i click it, ijust merely refresh the page!!!pls make NECCESARY arrangements if u could
Thanks
thank you
nothing to say