The next major release of the award winning desktop blogging software for Mac OS X is out.
Developed from the ground up to leverage the latest Mac OS X Technologies.
iBlog is an elegant desktop blogging solution that makes authoring and publishing personal blogs a breeze. Unlike other blogging solutions you don?t have to be an expert database administrator or a perl programmer to setup and use iBlog. You can preview and publish blogs to your iDisk with a single click of a button.
Apart from iDisk, iBlog also supports publishing to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, AFP and Local servers. iBlog is a multi-document application, which means you can have multiple document windows of Blogs, Categories and Entries open at the same time. Simply copy Entries from one blog to the other using Drag and Drop.
iBlog indexes the content (Title, Summary and Body) of the entries automatically when you save them so you can quickly find the entry you are looking for by using the Search Field in the main iBlog window. The buttons at the bottom of the Main Window provide a quick access to the most common tasks in iBlog.
You customize the layout and appearance of the blog by using the settings (Theme and Stylesheet) in the Display section of the Blog window. All the options in the Blog are divided into multiple sections and you view each one by clicking the appropriate toolbar icon of the Blog window.
The Theme Builder in the Admin menu provides a Finder like column view to navigate the Themes folder. Select the file you want to view and an editor tab in opened in the lower half of the window. You cannot edit the default Theme (Classic) that is included in iBlog. You have to create a duplicate theme theme first by clicking the plus button.
The Admin menu also provides options for other functionality like managing the Authors and importing application data from the 1.x version. 2.x version provides the functionality to import all the important data from the previous version of the application.
Universal Binary and Tiger Ready
Version 2.0 RC 3
Media Browser
Adding Pictures, Music, Movies and more to any entry window in iBlog is as easy as drag and drop.
The included Media Browser provides a convenient way to browse, search and view all your iLife media in one convenient place. Apart from pictures, music and movies you can also view your browser bookmarks. Adding media files to your entry window is as easy as drag and drop.
After you add a picture to the Entry Summary or Body you can set its attributes by right clicking (Control + Click) the picture and selecting ?Edit Image Attributes? from the contextual menu. To create a Hyperlink in the Entry Summary of Body, Select the text you want to link and right click (Control + Click) to show the contextual menu and select ?Set Link Attributes?. You can also add media files and other attachments to the Entry window by clicking the Insert toolbar icon in the toolbar. You can also add files to the Entry window using Drag and Drop or Copy/Paste.
The Blog window in iBlog provides one convenient place to set different attributes of the Blog. The RSS section provides options to set the iTunes RSS attributes so your RSS feeds are iTunes ready and you can easily publish your Podcasts to the iTunes Podcasts Directory. The Display section lets you customize the layout and appearance of the Blog. The Publish section lets you create multiple publish locations (if required) and also ping different services after you publish the blog. The Tags section lets you create custom tags that you can use in your custom Template files. The Comments section lets you turn on/off Comments, Trackbacks, Google Site Search and Google Adsense to monetize your blog. The Sidebars section let you customize the primary and secondary sidebars by editing exiting items or creating new items.
Application Preferences
You can set the default fonts, date formats, backup location, iLife application library paths and preview settings.
User Testimonials
I must thank you for the great work with iBlog. Excellent program. I've tried others, but returned always to iBlog.
Francisco Jos dos Santos Pereira.
Portugal.
I have to say it's a marvelous program, highly capable, simple and easy to learn/operate. It's the paradigm of good interface to processing that would otherwise be difficult and or too diverse for most to attempt. Many thanks for the good work.
Gerry
United States.
You can drag and drop items in the sidebar to rearrange their position, drag and drop items from one sidebar to another to copy them and uncheck the items to disable them temporarily. You can set the number of sidebars in the Display section of the Blog window. To save Blog, Category or Entry click the Save button in the Toolbar or Select Save (Command + S) in the Edit Menu. You can set a custom folder name for the Blog, Category and Entry in the 2.0 version.
iBlog has a built-in bug reporter and crash reporter. Both these are turned on by default. While you are using the application if any error occurs the bug reporter window pops up and you can enter a brief description of what you were doing when the error occurred and send the report to us. The crash reporter window is displayed the first time you run the application after a crash. We included these features to proactively track all issues and fix them before adding new features. Our aim is to deliver a defect free software always which means fixing the existing defects before adding new features.
iBlog has a built-in backup feature that automatically saves a backup of the application data every 15 minutes and also when you quit the application. You can set the location of the backup folder in the application preferences.
The options in the Text Editing section let you set the default fonts, visibility of the formatting toolbar, Entry summary view and spell checking. The iLife section lets you set the Media file formats and the location of iLife applications library files.
The Previewing and Publishing of Blogs is performed on a separate thread so you can continue to use iBlog during these processes. iBlog remembers the state of the last preview and publish. HTML files are created only for new and updated items during Preview and only new files are uploaded during Publish. iBlog remembers the publish state per location and provides an option to select the list of files to upload during publishing. You use the following keyboard shortcuts for Previewing and Publishing the blogs.
Preview - Command + K
Reset Preview - Shift + Command +K
Publish - Command + L
Reset Publish - Shift +Command + L
Application Preferences
Backup, Preview, Text Editing.
Entry window?s toolbar provides quick access to the Editor, Source and Preview modes. The Editor mode supports WYSIWYG editing, Source mode provides a source code editor with live syntax coloring and Preview shows the final result in a Safari compatible Browser view. Insert and Media icons provide options to include media and data files in the Entry summary or body. You can use the Font and Color Panels in the Editor mode to customize the text. Print option is enabled in the Preview mode and Save option is enabled whenever there are unsaved changes. The Info panel provides a quick access to the secondary attributes of the entry like Post date, Draft status, Author, Ping URLs and etc.
Multi Document and Toolbar Support
Create multiple posts of different types
iBlog currently support four types of Entries. Standard Entry is the basic entry window with Title, Summary and Body. You can add media and other data files to this entry. All other entry types support the features of the Standard Entry. Music Entry provides a template for creating a list of tracks. File Sharing Entry provides a template to upload a list of archived files on the server so others can download them.
Podcast Entry lets you create and publish a Podcast to your blog and also submit the Podcast to the iTunes Podcast Directory. The RSS feed generated by iBlog contains the necessary enclosure and iTunes Podcast tags so you can share your Podcasts with the world. All Entry windows support three modes namely Editor, Source and Preview. The Editor mode supports WYSIWYG editing of the entry Title, Summary and Body. The Source mode shows the HTML source code of the entry Title, Summary and Body and the Preview mode displays the saved entry?s final html page in a web browser view.
The Info panel is displayed by clicking the Info icon in the toolbar. The Info panel contains additional information about the entry like draft status, top story options, author, ping URLs, Post Date and etc.
Looking for the older version?
iBlog 2.0 is a free upgrade for all registered users of the 1.x version. iBlog 2.0 also supports importing data from the 1.x version and we highly recommend all users to upgrade to the latest version.
Click the iBlog icon on the left to download the 1.4.6 version. This is the final build of the 1.x version and 2.0 imports data from the 1.4.6 version.
Lifli Software Private Limited