*sigh* 

I've been using Ecto as a blogging tool for a couple of years now. It's a nice offline blogging client with some features I can't imagine living without. In particular it has some great formatting tools, a versatile picture uploader, and a template/tag/snippet tool that makes my life huuuuugely easier.

But ...

Ecto was originally created for the Mac, with a separate developer working on the Windows version. Upgrades of the Windows version have gotten slower of late, and now the two versions have reached a parting of the ways. While the developer says he'll continue to support the Windows version, the signs aren't promising:

1. The announcement was the end of March.
2. A new name, "by the end of next week," hasn't come up. Indeed, nothing has come up on the site about the product.
3. The support forums have been moved to a new site -- but empty. A promise to migrate the previous outstanding issues (including a few of mine) "some time next week" hasn't happened.
4. The product is no longer for sale (but still available for download). 
5. The future of the product, moving into v.3, "remains to be decided."

On the other hand, a new point version was posted at the beginning of April (first since January). And that fixed the one most annoying bug in the program. And I've always found the developer to be responsive until the last several months.

So I'm worried. And it's not about whether the product is good (it is), or the developer isn't well-meaning (he is), just whether he's going to have enough time (so far, not), and whether the product will actually grow in the future (prognosis cloudy).

*sigh* 

I'll stick with it for now, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for a replacement, as well as considering whether it would make any sense to shift over to using the MT4 native input screen.

Irksome.

Filed under :: Blogging - Technical

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