This is a test post from WordPressDash – WordPressDash is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X 10.4 (a.k.a Tiger) which allows you to create and upload posts for your WordPress blog from the Dashboard.
In theory this is very cool – and it looks very cool, but in practice, it lacks a lot of features which would make it a must-have. For instance, there are no buttons for things like adding links, emphasis, images etc. Also, you chose your post category from a dropdown list, thus you can only associate one category per post.
If these couple of shortcomings could be addressed (and if a spellchecker could be built in) then this would become a very attractive widget. As it is currently, it is merely a curiousity and a proof of concept – needs more work!
Cheers to Matt for pointing this widget out.
UPDATE:
I wrote to Paniris Web the writers of the WordPressDash widget about my experience of the widget and got the following response from them:
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the feedback! Version 0.3 of WordPressDash will include the ability
to post to multiple categories (should be released on my website within the
week). And all widget’s have built-in spellcheck (just control-click in the a
textbox, and choose one of the options from the “Spelling” menu.Adding support for links, emphasis, etc is a great idea! I think I will add
that to the next release. (If you know of any safari-compatible WYSIWYG
editors, please let me know!).Thanks for using WordPressDash, and I appreciate your feedback!
– Kyle
Definitely one to keep an eye on – good job guys.
Great to see something like this – if a decent one for Blogger comes out, maybe I’ll work up the courage to install Tiger on my main machine 😉
WYSIWYG editors are a bad thing IMHO – they’re um … well I just don’t like them 🙂
I’d rather encourage the author to use human-readable editor interfaces ala textism’s Textile or (even better) John Grubers Markdown that are parseable by more than just browsers – although I suppose that is possibly anti-semantic
// hostyle
There’s one called Dashblog which I regularly use to post to my blog.
I tried Dashblog Twenty but it doesn’t allow you to save as a draft and it doesn’t support categories – two features of WordPressDash which I think are good.
The Save as Draft facility allows you to write a post but not publish it until you have access to the full WP interface (if there’s any reason you might need such a facility(!)
I’ve used a couple of these widgets in the past on both windows and linux. They are vaguely useful, but the only reason I can see for using them would be if I wanted to write a very long, complicated entry and needed to do multiple edits etc. I’d prefer to use a text editor for that.
I always write in a text editor but Dashblog is great for simply posting the post, as it were. It saves having to log in to blogger, click ‘new post’, ‘publish post’ etc.
There are some programs which do the same thing. I have one called Ecto, I think, which seems to be quite good but I haven’t used it a huge amount.
Ok, I see where you are coming from now Twenty. I always write in the WordPress backend interface to have access to all its features. The one thing it lacks is a Spell Checker – hence my Spell Checker suggestion to Paniris.
I can see how you might want to use any admin interface other than the Blogger one – I have used that for a couple of Blogger blogs I manage and it can be frustratingly slow at times. The speed of the WordPress interface is dictated by where you chose to host it unlike Blogger which is dictated by where they chose to host it (and how many others are using it at the same time).
Thanks, Twenty!