So, Dave is the father of RSS, which I cherish dearly. Writing online and publishing through RSS is the past, the now and the future. He’s been on a crusade to get people to write online, which is good, but I think that he’s misled on his focus. He’s working on a WordPress editor in the browser.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/02.html
As someone who writes online and does so since 2004, I don’t need a browser-based text editor because the browser is the worst GUI ever to write things, and writers need a good GUI. It’s that simple.
I’ve been using Live Writer for a very, very long time. Why? Because it’s a native app that allows me to focus without a sea of tabs around. It’s a native app that never, ever crashes (OK, maybe once every five years and it saves your last post anyway, so). It’s a native app with all the classic keyboard shortcuts from word processing software, and all the non-delayed display that goes with native apps. It simply connects via API to WordPress (and others) and does everything that Dave has been working on, except that it’s been done, fully working and stable since around 2008. 17 years ago.
There are great native apps on all operating systems that can do the same. It’s such a vastly better experience, I do not understand why experienced developers can’t see that:
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Writers are not necessarily technical and might not want to deal with anything but just typing.
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Typing words has been solved for 40 years, leveraging that by using native apps that most people understand, is much better than introducing them to stuff they don’t care about (learning some markdown syntax to make some text bold, is overkill; people know how to select text with a mouse and click on that big B).
The one thing that is still unsolved in the world of online writing to this day, is automatic upload of pictures to an online location. It’s well known that a picture in a post makes it more attractive and yet, no one has done the programming/scripting work to make it easy for writers to do that! Give me the ability to drag and drop a file in my native writing app, which would then be uploaded somewhere, and people will start writing online a lot more.
You could say “bro, you can drag and drop pictures in your WordPress editor and they will be uploaded automatically to your gallery!” Yeah but I want those pictures somewhere else (separating picture uploads and words is really, really recommended maintenance-wise), and using WordPress browser editor makes my computer run hot or I need the latest super expensive one to make typing a nice experience that is already nice with my native app on my older computers, so no thank you. And yes, using links and displaying them is not that big of a deal, but it’s hurdle for anyone not technical/starting to write online.
As I said, writing on a computer has been solved and has been a good experience for a very long time, why would we ignore that? To keep buying new computers? To make people believe that the browser is all we need when we know that it’s not true?
Why programmers can’t build on top of each other more often? Why do they always have to start from scratch, wasting time? Why do programmers always seem to think to know what people need?
Can someone add a discrete/automatic FTP system in Live Writer?That would be fantastic.