I tend to experiment with tools like these – I’m also trying out QumanaXP beta – as I search for an ideal editor.

So far, RocketPost has been a great tool. It’s powerful and simple to use with an interface that is easy to understand. It offers some great features and I thought it is indeed the best such tool out there on the Windows platform.

Until now. Earlier this week, RocketPost checked online for an updated version, found one and installed it. That’s when the trouble began.

Crashing, instability and unreliability. My Windows XP event viewer is peppered with error events all saying variations of “Hanging application RocketPost.exe, version 1.5.0.0, hang module hungapp, version 0.0.0.0, hang address 000000000.” Uninstalling it proved really tricky (no uninstaller!) which I achieved by running the setup again which uninstalled the existing install. Installed it again but no improvement (if anything, crashing got even worse). So it’s now completely uninstalled.

Problems do happen with software so you get in touch with the vendor’s support. That’s what I did with RocketPost – four emails so far to the support email address and to the developer himself. No reply at all. I’m now a little pissed off, especially as I did cough up the $99 to buy RocketPost. This is not a cheap application.

So I’m left with a completely unusable product, I’m out $99 and I get no reply from the vendor or the support people. Maybe the vendor will see this post and respond. Otherwise I guess I’ll put it all down to experience and not recommend RocketPost to anyone.

Meanwhile it’s back to my love/hate relationship with ecto for Windows.

Add to DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Technorati:

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.

BlogDesk is totaly free of charge and optimized for the blog systems WordPress and ExpressionEngine as well as the bloghosters Blogg.de and Twoday.net.

Whether it’s grandma & grandpa or the corporate blogger, whether it’s an online diary or a high traffic blog, they all will profit from BlogDesk. And sure enough, their readers will, too.

Written by Johannes Oppermann in Germany, this looks promising. Setting BlogDesk up with this blog was very straightforward – fill in some details, a couple of clicks and that was it.

So I’m writing this post in BlogDesk. If this works, I might play with this one for a while.

Add to DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Technorati:

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.

While I’ve not been using it for every post I’ve been writing to my blogs – I’ve been mixing and matching between ecto for Windows, my long-time offline editor, and RocketPost which I’m also trying out – QumanaXP is very impressive.

The latest beta 3.0.0-b1 reflects some serious development work over previous betas – they do listen to the testers – and shows a strong commitment by Qumana to produce a reliable tool for blogging that will stand up well against the competition.

One thing I’m very pleased (and relieved) to see is that a major issue with posting to TypePad blogs has been resolved with this latest beta. Until now, if you posted to your TypePad blog, any category you’d set in your post would not carry through to final publish. This for me was a complete show-stopper for QumanaXP. From my email conversations with the developers, it appeared that this was a TypePad issue, not a QumanaXP one. Either was, they’ve fixed it.

I also tried QumanaXP with my WordPress blog – works perfectly including with categories.

Today QumanaXP goes into public beta, meaning anyone can download the beta and take it for a spin. It will be formally launched at the Northern Voice 2006 community-based blogging and personal publishing conference taking place today and tomorrow in Vancouver, Canada.

But don’t wait – download the beta now! Try it for yourself. You might also want to take a look at the contest Qumana has launched as part of their incentivizing bloggers to use their tool

I’ll be posting more detailed commentary about QumanaXP soon.

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.

In that post, I talked about ecto for Windows, BlogJet and Qumana as examples of popular editors for Windows (and for the Mac, in some cases) which enable you to write your blog posts offline, on your own computer.

I’m now looking closely at Anconia RocketPost, a suggestion from Netanel Jacobsson.

On just a first quick look after install, I am impressed with this tool. It’s the closest I’ve seen yet to a solution to what I believe is a yawning gap in the market for a robust and reliable blog editing application for Windows that’s easy to use yet with powerful features. A sort of Microsoft Word for blogs. Could this be the one?

RocketPost offers a 30-day free trial which I’m on. Then it’s $100 for the license for the professional version (there are three versions including a free one).

I’m writing this post with this app. Very easy and intuitive to use.More later once I’ve played a bit with RocketPost.

[Edit] Hmm. It didn’t publish without my going into TypePad directly and publishing it. The post was in the list of posts and shown as published, but it hadn’t been. I’ll hold judgment on the reason as I suspect it’s more to do with Typepad – the server response back to RocketPost from posting took a very long time (4+ minutes) and logging in to my account simply took ages.

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.