In my never ending quest to find the best tools for blogging with I’ve stumbled across another off-line blogging tool for use with MovableType called MTClient. My favorite tool previously had been Zempt by Bill Zeller & Adam Kalsey, but that hasn’t been updated since last November and the last release still has some issues that I’d had hoped would have been resolved by now. The other tool of this sort I’ve played with was SharpMT by Randy of RandyRants.com which is now up to version 2.3 with 2.4 in beta testing. SharpMT is pretty good, but requires Microsoft’s .NET to be installed on your PC to use which some folks, myself included, aren’t overly happy with.
So far, MTClient is pretty good. One thing it has that I really like is inline spell-checking similar to what you’d get in Microsoft Word. The interface is close to what you see in MovableType itself so it should be familiar and easy to adapt to. It supplies all of the functions you’d want like uploading a file, adding hyper and image links, bold, italics, underline, and strike through text, blockquote, text alignment, and will even pop up a window with HTML entities for things like © and ™ and various foreign language accents. Of course, you can save your entries offline for later uploading and it supports all of the fields in MovableType that you’d expect.
Overall, I’m impressed. This being my first entry with it I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I tell it to send it off, but if it’s half as stable as it seems then I may have to introduce this to Momma so she can add to her blog a little more easily.
Oh yeah, I likes this one a lot!