Well, this is my first post with Qumana (Version 3 beta 1), a free desktop offline blog post editor. It’s pretty cool, though I do have some issues with it.

Feature wise, it does everything you would expect, offering a basic editor with the ability to format text, add links and images and so on; as well as more blog specific stuff like adding categories to posts and trackback URLs, etc.

Setting it up is very easy, and BlogJet could learn a thing or two from Qumana on this aspect. There’s no need to tell it what platform I am using, nor the location of my xmlrpc.php file. It sorts all that out for me. Cool. Also, the speed at which posts are visible on the blog is a lot quicker than BlogJet – which for some reason takes ages to appear.

Two features of Qumana stand out. One is the ‘droppad’ which sits on the desktop while Qumana is running, and onto which you can drag text and images. Then, the next time you create a new blog post, all that stuff appears automatically. Fairly cool idea, but in reality you are going to spend more time sorting out the formatting and layout of all this stuff you have dumped than you would if you had don it manually from the off. Second, Qumana offers a bespoke blog advertising programme called AdGenta which fills your blog posts with contextual adverts. Hmmm. Not one for me, I must admit.

The main problem for me with Qumana is the speed. It takes too long to load in the first place and then there seems to be some sort of weird delay when typing, which may have something to do with the spell checker. Also, for some reason, ctrl-backspace doesn’t delete a whole word. Grrr.

Overall, it’s interesting. For those who aren’t sure whether they need an offline post editor it is a good bet to try first, as it’s free. But BlogJet will still be my number one choice for speed and simplicity.

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