Posts by Pico – A quick review of the blog editing tool

I’ve worked with Posts for a little while now, enough to form an opinion of how it works. And overall it’s a pretty nice little program that has a lot of features going for it. With a couple of simple feature fixes, it could rise to the top of the blog editing software pile and hold it’s own against the likes of Blogsy and Poster.

Here are several of the features I really like:

The thumbnail view of articles is pretty nice. The titles show up in large print like a slew of newspaper headlines.

It supports multiple blogs both from WordPress and Blogger.

You can edit and post comments from within Posts itself.

The editor is very efficient. You can use formatting such as H1, Blockquote or Pre tags. You can insert links, indent, add images, select the publicating date, set the Category and Tags as well as jump into the HTML editor to fine tune the formatting.

You have control over inserted images such as the size, Alt Text, Tooltip and how it wraps around the text. In essence you get the same control as you would expect from something like Windows Live Writer.

Now, no program is without flaws and Posts has just a few:

The ability to picks tags needs to be improved. You can’t start typing and then select from the list of matches. You have to scroll through the entire index.

The HTML editor seems to add a lot of extra spacing to the output. How that would show up when actually published I don’t know, but there was too much spacing between paragraphs.

The editor doesn’t have a quick way to set text as a List. I wanted to set the text above to be a bulleted listed without using the HTML tags.

The comment font is almost too small to be readable. The same editor used for articles would be an improvement.

The main editor doesn’t seem to use the same autocorrect features that you would see in most other apps. Or is that because of the wireless keyboard?

The main editor doesn’t scroll when you reach the very bottom of the screen. You have to tap it to see the last line of text you’re writing.

Overall, I think Posts is a very good blogging tool and in fact this article was written with it on my iPad using the wireless keyboard. Hopefully the price won’t return to the $9.99 as that is just too damn high for a blogging tool, especially when other tools are coming in at $4. Also, considering some of the functionality that could be improved, it would be wise to keep the price in line with other apps. At $9.99 you’re in the same league as Pages and the two apps done even come close to each other in refinement and functionality.

That being said, for the Free pricetag I paid I believe I will be using this blogging tool more and more. I hope to see more updates from the author and look forward to an improved feature set. Anyone else grab this tool during the price drop? What do you think of it? Anyone able to make comparisons between Post, Blogsy and Poster?

Check out more screenshots and information on the Pico Developer Site