Kicking the tires: ecto 2.3.10 for Windows

Posted by Daniel Stout on Thu 17 Jan 2008 at 7:03 AM

I’ve been looking at ways to be more productive with blogging, and one tip I’ve heard various places is to use an offline blog editor. The one I hear mentioned the most is ecto. ecto comes in Mac and Windows versions, but the Mac version is the predominant one. I decided to give ecto 2.3.10 for Windows a go and see what it’s like. You can try ecto for free for two weeks, and then it is $17.95 to buy.

I must say that my initial impressions are not good. Here’s a list of problems I’ve run into in the process of getting my first blog post posted with ecto. First, the installer crashed. I don’t think I’ve ever had an installer crash before. And it didn’t crash in a typical Windows way. It just disappeared, which is something I’ve seen happen on Mac and Linux, but not really on Windows. So I ran the installer again, and this time it installed.

Right away it runs through the blog setup. I setup my first blog and accepted the defaults. Then it brought me to the main window. On the left-hand column was the name of my blog, and on the right, presumably, would be the list of blog entries. But when I clicked on the blog name, it would pause for a moment and then spit out this error:

fault response contains string value where integer expected [fault response : struct mapped to type Fault : member faultCode mapped to type Int32]

Not a very useful error because it didn’t tell me what was wrong. But I hadn’t done much in ecto so far, so I figured it was one of the settings. For the API type, ecto had selected “MetaWeblog.” I changed this to “MovableType,” and then the strange error went away.

That was about the time when I noticed that the main window was having redraw problems. There is a field labeled View on the main toolbar. It’s a dropdown field that you can select what entries to view, such as, All, Published, or Drafts. But when you select one of the menus items in the row above, such as Help or Windows, the remnants of that menu overwrites the contents of the View field. It looks odd and is clearly a bug.

Now that I’m actually writing a post, I’m noticing a few more things. For example, the spell checker doesn’t seem to be self-aware. So far it has marked a number of words as misspelled: ecto, blog, toolbar, blogging, offline – to name a few. A blogging tool that doesn’t know the word “blog” seems odd or careless.

Speaking of careless, the user interface isn’t consistent. When you’re setting up a profile, it uses this attractive, flat, 2D design to the buttons. But everywhere else in the application uses the default Windows XP button styles (I’m running ecto on Windows XP).

Another thing is I switched from Rich View to HTML View. In Rich View, when you hit Enter, it does the paragraph double-spacing, which is what I would expect. But when you’re in the HTML View, there is no need for paragraph spacing – the <p> tags take care of that. But surprisingly even in code view, it does a double-space, even though the actual code that ecto itself produces is single-spaced. You have to hit shift-Enter to do a single space in code view. I changed the Edit Mode from Rich Text to HTML, which is apparently different somehow than the Rich View and HTML View, but that didn’t fix the problem.

Here’s another thing I noticed, even though I’m in HTML View, it doesn’t consider my code sacrosanct. I put in a couple of &#8211; to do an n-dash, but it replaces my HTML entities with &ndash; Not a big deal, but I’d prefer that it leave my code alone. There don’t seem to be any preference settings where you can change this behavior. In fact, I can’t find any preference settings at all for the editing window. So I guess it’s either take it or leave it.

Despite all that, I generally like what I see, but I have to wonder if anyone is using the Windows version on a successful basis day-in and day-out. I think for now the bugs and the editing defaults that are non-customizable will keep me from using ecto for Windows. I had high hopes from what I had heard about the Mac version, but the Windows version needs major work.

Tags: blogging software · ecto · windows

This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Validation: XHTML 1.0 Strict • CSS 2.1 • Atom 1.0