TechLifeBlogged

Qumana, the offline blogging tool now has version 3 in public beta. I've just downloaded it (little over 8MB). In fact, this is my first post using it. We'll have to see over time and, granted this is still beta but I'd have to say this is definitely the best version yet.

I chose to install the new version (now called QumanaXP) into a different directory than the previous version. This meant that I had to set up the connection to my blog again. That went without a hitch and was as easy as entering my blog address and then my user name and password. QumanaXP auto-discovered that I use blogger and set everything up automagically.

The new interface is much cleaner. I was pretty critical about the icons in version 2. They seemed to be jumbo and take up too much space. I'm not sure that the new ones are any smaller but they seem to fit in much better.

One thing that is cool is the new 'spell as you type' feature. I is similar to MS Word in that it puts a red underline under a misspelled word. Then you just right click on the word and look for a suggested spelling. Very nice. The only slight drag is that the red line is there as you type each letter until you space to the next word. Not huge but take a few seconds to get used to.

The real treat is something I've been asking them for since the beginning. HTML source! Yes, finally! At the bottom of the edit window are 2 tabs, WYSIWYG and Source View. Sometimes you just need to hack the code a bit to make things better and this now allows easy back and forth switching. You can also edit right in source view and you'll see the changes in WYSIWYG when you switch back.

Preferences have changed too:
You can have the enter key start a new paragraph or a new line
You can have the edit window close after you publish.
You can have QumanaXP ping all sorts of services. This isn't on by default but QumanaXP does list 2 services to ping if you check the box.
You can turn off the default 'Powered by Qumana' text.

All is not completely roses. One thing that doesn't seem to be working for me is the bullets and indenting and blockquoting. The all seem to push the text to the right (all text, not just the section I'm trying to work on) but don't do what they are supposed to do. Also, it doesn't look like you can resize the drop pad. Not a big deal but it also is opaque. I'd like  to change the value of the opaqueness so it becomes a bit more invisible like we had in version 2.

All in all, if you blog, go get QumanaXP and give it a try. I think you'll find it a nice tool for working off line and much improved over the last versions.

Tags: blogging qumana

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