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The first post with the second beta of the forthcoming ecto for Windows version 2 offline blog editor.

Yes, it's a beta and so you expect to encounter bugs and other quirks. On first run, though, I'm impressed especially with the changes I see in the post editor.

Now, there is true WYSIWYG editing instead of the semi-code view of past versions. You can also access full HTML code view to directly edit the code of your post. While I like the semi-code view, there's no question I prefer the combination of a rich-text editing environment and the option to dive into the complete code if I want.

In such respects, ecto for Windows is now in line with the type of editing interaction offered by competing products like BlogJet.

Other immediate things I noticed and which I like a lot include correct post formatting. With the current version 1.8.8 and previous versions I've used, I had a constant problem with creating posts for this WordPress blog where the only formatting option was no line breaks' meaning that, no matter which blog platform API ecto was configured for, I still had to manually insert start and ending paragraph tags otherwise everything would be posted as one continuous paragraph.

Now I see that the formatting drop-down list doesn't offer me any options, but a look at the code view for this post shows those paragraph tags automatically inserted. I'm fine with that as long as it works.

Another good thing - I see the menu bar and the formatting menu now include options to format text as bulleted or numbered lists. At last!

The only bug I've encountered so far in writing this post is that the undo feature doesn't seem to work.

I installed this beta on a PC which already has ecto for Windows 1.8.8 installed, so it was not a fresh install - it picked up all my blog and other settings from that install. I haven't gone through setting up a blog from scratch with this beta so can't comment on how well or not that works.

So a quick post with initial thoughts. I've not tried anything else yet (eg, insert an image or photo) which I'll get to soon.

Initial impression - this beta version looks very good indeed. Nice work, ecto.

Related posts:

• The trouble with RocketPost
• More choices with offline blog editors
• Filling the market gap for offline blog editors
• QumanaXP public beta launched

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology. Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: NevilleHobson.com.