Posting from BloGTK 1.1

28 Mar 2005

Just for kicks, to see if it’s any easier than using a plain old web browser to interface with the blog!

Anyway, BloGTK is a desktop client for WordPress which runs on Linux systems. Niggly features I’ve discovered in the last 30 seconds:

• Can’t select text, then click the “hyperlink” icon, and have the anchor tags wrap around selected text — they appear to the right of it.
• Compulsory “target” field in anchor generation — which I don’t think (if I recall correctly) is even valid in XHTML 1.1, possibly earlier.
• Lack of built-in quick tags that WordPress’ own posting interface has, namely for unordered lists, list items, and tagging of abbreviations, etc.
• Ironically, it’s possible to define your own tags, which can wrap around selected text just fine, whilst the “built-in” anchor button doesn’t do this… Hmm, okay.

It’s really little things, nothing major — the formatting tags (strong, em, etc.) work just fine on selections, which is great. It also has an inbuilt preview which (I’m 99% sure) functions using an internal rendering engine (or part of the GTK toolkit, same thing), rather than making HTTP calls. A change that’d be interesting to see (although one which doesn’t affect me directly) would be the implementation of either a WYSIWYG editor, or simply Textile or Markdown support with XMLHttpRequest being used (or something like it? I gather that’s a JavaScript thing, not having ever used it, so it mayn’t be usable like that.

Another thing that’d be nice is the implementation of keyboard shortcuts, just for text formatting stuff — so, Ctrl + B for strong and em tags, etc. And also the changing of the category display to a list of checkboxes in its own frame (or whatever the term is in desktop app interface design lingo) on the right of the posting area, instead of a dropdown — that’d allow posters to select multiple categories, more rapidly.

It’s a good simple app (sorry… I know it’s probably rather unsimple when you look at the code driving behind it, but I don’t understand any of that Python stuff, so I’m just judging on the interface), but a few niggly things mean I’d still prefer to use the native WordPress web interface.

Edit: In part to see if it does, but also because I had another thought — the absence of a “Posting…” status window is also something which could be improved, just so the user doesn’t think the application has crashed. It took a while here due to my ISP’s poor DNS performance, and had I not known why it was going slowly, I may have closed the application thinking it had crashed.