UPDATE: as sometimes happens with posts, I didn’t do the research properly. Turns out there are ratings for this product and the recent upgrade skewed the results. I thought it odd but didn’t dig into it, let that be a lesson… to me.
You’ll remember from my earlier post, Blog Editor Review – Part I, that I set very specific criteria for myself when looking for an offline text editor. I also gave myself one day to do it.
The criteria I set for myself were:
- Look & Feel
- Ease of Use
- WordPress integration
- Community/Actively being updated??
- Cost
I ended up choosing Desk (details below). Simply put, it was a piece of art to look at, easy to integrate with WordPress, let me work offline with a really, really clean, minimalistic interface. Publishing was as easy as clicking a button if you setup the ‘Quick Publish’ feature and not much harder using the standard method. Their website was another piece of art, very nicely done. Their community is very active – I even signed up for John’s “10 Days to a Better Blog!” challenge. Read about the developer; John Saddington and his passion here. Finally the price; at $29.99 its not cheap but when you consider the added benefit of an active community and the obvious love the developer has for this product it just makes you want to ‘drink the Kool Aid’. If it gets me back to where I want to be with my blogging then its a small price to pay.
Desk ($29.99/4+ stars) is the last App to be reviewed. While there were insufficient reviews to display any ‘star’ ratings the App did receive “Best App of 2014” by Apple. Once again, there is no free trial so certain assumptions will have to be made for the look and feel category. The App looks very pleasing to the eye and it’s simplicity is sure to excite both the casual or frequent blogger. WordPress (and many others) integration is included. There is a very active blog and Google+ community for this product with the most recent posts being yesterday! The most recent version 1.1 was updated on December 29th, 2014.
the dan blog 