Martin over at the Blog Columnist has posted a review of Review of Qumana (v3.0) which those looking for a blog desktop editing solution might be interested in.
About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Hi Darren. I also put my two cents in for the newest version of Qumana this week. See it here:
http://www.pajamamarket.com/pajama_market_small_busin/2006/09/qumana_releases.html
I’ve had nothing but trouble with al the versions of Qumana I’ve tried, particularly it seems to be a resource hog on my laptop, which hurts when I’m running mobile, certainly it seems to run java pretty hot.
The drop pad has never appealed to me, Zoundry’s “Blog this” button works for me as does Performancing for Firefox’s blog this right click menu item.
The handling of div’s is really poor in the preview window, with divs that align right shown centered and not wrapped. Qumana has stalled my whole machine twice through my testing and it was quickly removed from my system.
The basic photo upload feature didn’t allow for posting the photos to a different directory within my drupal setup, so I had to allow read write access to a new folder for the photos to show up.
My answer is Zoundry if you want the photos to be easily uploaded, you can resize thumbnails and it uploads the thumbnail and the original. The interface is… different, but once you get used to all the small buttons you can see that most of them are useful. The next version of Zoundry is what I’m hanging out for! At the moment I gravitate between Zoundry and Performancing neither does everything, but both are better than direct input into the drupal interface.
Hi Daren. I was excited to read about it, but i tried it and unfortunately Qumana doesn’t seem to work for me. No idea what the problem is, but it doesn’t go past the splashscreen from the beggining, and it freezes there. Too bad. I was really looking forward on trying it out.
Any other similar programs for “offline blogging” you might know about?
I fought with two previous Windows versions of Qumana and gave up in frustration. As mentioned already it:
1. Is a huge resource hog … slows my expensive laptop to a crawl
2. Had no spell check (did they add one yet?)
3. Murders DIVs (as mentioned)
4. Does not handle images well
5. Insists on “pooping” a huge logo on my screen that serves no apparent purpose except to advertise Qumana
Recommended for Windows users: Windows Live Writer . Don’t be put off by the name, although designed for Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s goal is to make WLW work with every blogging platform. Works great with WordPress.
1. “snappy” performance, doesn’t slow me down.
2. Integrates directly into Internet Explorer, works fine as a stand alone program with FireFox.
3. Has a real spell check … thank goodness
4. Has a very efficient image handling menu, re-size on the fly, reset borders, makes image work easy
5. Works off a standard program icon or a toolbar in Internet Explorer, does not pollute your desktop.
needles to say, I like it … give it a try and see how it works for your own blogging style.
The main thing that I need is easy image uploading. I want to be able to grab a picture from for example a free stock photos website and drag it into the blog writer software. I want the blog software to then upload the image on to my own webspace.
Most blog writers just make an img src tag from the image and end up leeching the images
Only ecto does this feature well as far as I know.
Dave Starr > Thank you for posting about Windows Live Writer. I see that you can right click, copy image, paste, upload.
Plus it’s pretty fast. Does it have a place where you can view all posts from your blog so you can edit already published blogs? Well, I’ll look around and see if I can find that feature.
thanks again :)
Qumana is a great idea and so far it is working out pretty well for me even though there are still a few kinks that need to be sifted through. If you have more than a couple of blogs like I do and have something to post on each of them – then this makes posting to them seperately pretty darn fast.
Some things that I would like to see improved on are…
#1 The insert photo part – because it doesn’t really upload the photo that you need to the internet like you can do with blogspot blogs.
#2 I would like to be able to not have to use my entire screen in order to work on it. You know how sometimes when you are writing about something and you need to see what you are reading on the internet? Well, there is just no way for me to have more than one window open on my screen because Qumana wants to take up my entire screen.
Overall though, it’s a pretty good program and I think it’s going to go far once the bugs are fixed.