RE: PostXING Review - Yet Another Blog Posting Client

Ah! It's been a while since I've gotten some good PostXING feedback. Guess the current version isn't very keyboard-friendly. I'm probably not going to upgrade the v1 code in v1 of .net, but I've been working for the past couple of weeks on getting PostXING to v2 under .net v2, so none of these requests are out of the question. As a matter of fact, I welcome all criticism in the hopes of making PostXING a product that works really well for more than just myself. Anyways, Peter has some good feedback for PostXING in general, my responses follow his post:

I decided today to try out PostXING as an alternative to BlogJet. So far my reaction is mixed.

Pros

• Seems to have good WYSIWYG support
• I like having the standard HTML heading tags available in the toolbar.
• I can easily insert a horizontal rule in my post
• I love the fact that it has the CodeHTMLer syntax hilighting engine in it, but it doesn't feel quite as smooth to me as BlogJet does.
• I'm very glad that it supports uploading images via FTP in the same way that BlogJet does. This is a must have in my book.
• As with BlogJet, I can't open an arbitrary post by ID. I have to find it in the historical list of posts, which sucks when the post is from a year ago.

Cons

• I have to click a button and wait for a popup to set the post's categories
• I can't use TAB to navigate the UI which means I have to use the mouse (a serious usability error as far as I'm concerned). And I don't know if I agree with the idea that TAB causes BLOCKQUOTE in the resulting HTML.
• I can't find keystrokes for many of the standard formatting things like ordered and unordered lists, styles, etc.
• Sometimes after using CTRL+K to format some text as a link (good), the input focus leaves the text editor and goes up to Title field (bad).
• I can't figure out how to post with a keystroke. It should be CTRL+Enter (like Outlook and BlogJet) but it isn't.

This will be my first post with it, we'll see if it is also my last. If the author can fix a few of those cons, I would be considering switching. For now though, I'm not so sure.

This seems like such a simple problem... I can't believe how poor all the choices really are.

[Via Geek Noise]

I'll try to address these as best I can, starting with the last Pro...

• This is a drawback of the MetaWeblog API, which is why you see the same behavior across both BlogJet and PostXING. The only way to really get around this is to use a different API to access your blog, like perhaps the webservice API in CS. Hopefully when CS v2 drops I'll be able to code up a plugin/provider that allows native access to the webservice api instead of having to use mwb all the time.
• In v2, the popup is replaced with a "Container Bar", but it's still the same concept. How would you rather see the category feature implemented? Perhaps as a dropdown next to the title kind of like w.bloggar?
• PostXING does capture the tab key in the editor surface to create a blockquote: I did this to be able to format quotes quickly. Maybe it was a wrong decision, but this is the first time that I've ever heard anything bad (if a Con is bad) about it. I could for sure make this configurable, but what should the default behavior be? Insert 4 spaces, or be able to tab around the rest of the application? I guess at the time that I implemented the tab capture, I figured the editor experience was the main focus of PostXING.
• You can't find these keystrokes because they don't exist. What should they be?
• This is 100% mshtml code (especially the ctrl+k part). I don't know how to address this but like all of the other points I'm open to suggestion.
• Again, there is no keystroke for this. Sorry. :( I will for sure add ctrl+Enter support, but which button should this be associated with? Post or Post & Publish?