Qumana…offline blog editor
I’m always on the hunt for tools that either make my life easier…or are ones that do so for others. Qumana appears, at first use, to be just such a tool.
With all the buzz about Web 2.0, one would surmise that browser-based applications are the Holy Grail of online use. They’re typically slow, require being tethered to the internet to use, and are often flaky in their use (yes, even AJAX apps). Offline tools can often be far superior *if* they have close ties to the online application.
I recall the incredible objections that were posed by enterprise buyers of Salesforce.com when they initially didn’t have an offline tool for salespeople to take the Web hosted customer data along with them into the field. Their offline tool, however, was so robust (you can suck down all relevant customer data, add/subtract from the dataset in the field, then sync up when online again) that it stopped those objections.
I’m going to simply post this to Typepad without a preview to see what happens. If it works…I’ll be posting this way most of the time. I like it. Here is a screenshot of their web site:
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About Steve Borsch
Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.
Connecting the Dots Podcast
Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.
Steve, Thanks for giving Q a try. How do you like it so far? Post looks good to me.
Like it alot. Only “nit” is when I put an image in. With Typepad, it word-wraps the image based on placement. In Qumana, I had a number of options, selected “left” and then went about doing my post (the image showed up in the post body box).
Then, after completing the post, I clicked “insert” and went to refresh my blog and look at it. The alt tag “qumana” was there but no image. What was NOT intuitive was that I first should’ve done an “Upload and Insert” but initially thought that meant just the image would go live with no blog post…not what I would’ve wanted. I know now that that meant it would be ready for insertion into the post AND ultimately posted as one whole post.
Much I like about your software. In fact, I can visualize it being perfect for multi-author blogging.
Question: have you considered widening the scope of this tool for, say, posting as an author or editor with open source content management systems (several clients of mine are using both Joomla and Drupal). It would dramatically shorten learning curves and allow offline content creation.
Steve, I’ve tried Qumana but have recently taking a liking to Zoundry’s Blog Writer, eschewing its use for product-promo blogging and just using it for many different blog platforms, including Drupal. It’s image-handling is the best I’ve seen. All the pop-up photos in my recent blog entries were done using it.
http://www.zoundry.com/
Griff,
Zoundry looks good…but my preferred platform is Mac OS X and this is a Windows-only product.
Of course, now that Mac runs on Intel chips, has “Boot Camp” (a beta of software to allow booting into either Mac or an installed copy of Windows) as well as Parallels virtual machine, I may be in a position to use Windows apps. I do have a WinXP/Linux box, but do all my content creation on Mac’s (since I have Photoshop CS and a bazillion other tools on Mac vs. Windows).
I’ve only tried Ecto (Mac-only, I think) and have been pretty pleased with it.