Offline Blog Post Editing on Mac OSX – Part 4: MacJournal

Technically, MacJournal is not a blogging software. Or, we should rather say that it is more than that. Developed by Mariner Software, it is a journaling commercial software which license costs about $40. As for other software reviewed in this series, MacJournal can be freely tried for a limited time.

Picture 1: Setting up a blog

Although its main purpose is text editing, MacJournal 6 allows publishing entries on a blog. The share menu allows setting up multiple blogs where you can send your text. Few information are required to add a new blog as shown by Picture 1. But, only 8 blog systems are supported. The interface with blogs extends to downloading earlier posts from a blog and displaying them as MacJournal entries. This action takes a while for a disappointing result. The formatting is at least partially lost, and embedded objects such as videos are not displayed.

Picture 2: Few options and buttons are shown by default

The default settings give the impression that MacJournal is a raw text editor. Among the small number of displayed buttons and options, only two are related to text: one for setting the font and the other for the color (see Picture 2). However, this seem to have been intended by the developers for sake of simplifying the user experience. Actually, MacJournal does provides many more options. Some such as tag editing can be made available by customizing the toolbar or the info bar (see Pictures 3 and 4).

Pictures 3: Customizing the toolbar

Pictures 4: Customizing the infobar

Regarding the integration with the environment, MacJournal plays well with other Mac apps. You can insert media, either by drag and drop, or by selecting from MacJournal’s media browser (see Picture 5). This browser lists images, audio, and movies from iPhoto, iTunes, Garage Band and other multimedia software you might have. You can also browse web bookmarks and insert links already available in Safari. Besides, MacJournal does allow recording audio and video, as well as taking pictures using the Mac webcam or acquiring them using a scanner.

Picture 5: Media Browser’s Top Pane

Regarding editing support, MacJournal has all basic features expected from an editor. Besides, the user is provided with other functionalities such as spell and grammar checking, as well as various helpers to discover and auto-format lists, or links. When pasting text copied from other applications, MacJournal does save all the formatting, including links. Copied selection can include images too. Speaking of images, they can easily resized, by simply dragging the bottom right corner. This bring us to another minor but annoying limitation of MacJournal. It’s impossible to use images as link anchors, even if there is a “Link…” entry in the right-click menu. An even more important limitation is that there is no support for HTML editing, which forbids inserting code such as embedding a video or any other material from another site.

Picture 6: Sending a Post to a Blog

Once a post is ready to be published, you go to the “Share” menu and select the target blog, as MacJournal supports having multiple blogs. Picture 6 shows the window that pops up as a result. One can select the category of the post, and set other options such as pushing the post as a draft or to publish it immediately. Few seconds after pressing the OK button, your post including images becomes available on the blog.