Having worked on the Windows platform exclusively since Windows95 OSR2 (yes, I was an OS/2 hold out), I’ve seen a lot of software for all sorts of uses. Having heard through all those years that Windows dominated for software availability and diversity, one would be surprised to find a killer app on the Mac that wasn’t available for Windows. I first discovered such a killer app several years ago called LaunchBar when slowly migrating to the Mac platform. I soon found others (and by the way, QuickSilver has since replaced LaunchBar in my Utilities folder) and of late, I’ve officially discovered MarsEdit.

MarsEdit is a blog editor with gung-ho power. Supporting various popular blogging engines such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox, Red Sweater Software has pretty much covered the majority of you bloggers out there. I’ve seen MarsEdit before but was apprehensive to download and try it because my previous experience with blog editors, mainly on Windows, because they just couldn’t replicating my web interface experience of WordPress well enough. I found myself constantly having to log into my blog via Firefox to “touch” things up before posting. Why bother with an editor then? But I relented and gave MarsEdit a try and boy, am I glad I did. It immediately became one of my “Must Have” software installs!

One post is all it took, folks. With nearly full support of WordPress’ posting features, including the new keywords feature from the latest minor revision, and its seamless integration with flikr, I was hooked. I was greatly impressed with the simplicity of MarsEdit’s layout and the ability to easily customize it for my blog. I can add my site specific CSS tags and edit the preview template for exact representation of a post with SvenOnTech’s look-n-feel as I bang away on the keys of my thin metallic Apple keyboard. The former I had to hack WordPress to allow for custom tags and I would lose those tags after every upgrade. Now, no worries. If that’s not enough customization for you, then crank out some AppleScript and sky’s the limit, baby!

The cool feature list goes on with integration with your favorite editor (TextWrangler for me), macros to handle common repetitive tasks, support for more than one blog, integration with RSS readers such as NetNewsWire, and bookmarklet power. In short, you’ll be hard pressed finding something that sucks with MarsEdit. Look, like I said, I used a half of dozen Windows programs in the past and while they all promised a blogging experience that would lead be away from my web browser, I always found my self un-installing the disappointments days later. MarsEdit hasn’t led me to AppZapper. In fact, it has given me reassurance that there really is a good off-line blog editor out there worthy of $30. Heck, don’t tell Red Sweater, but I would have probably paid even more!