Over at Teekay’s

I’v been playing around with different set-ups for blogging over the last few days and have pretty much settled, for now, on TypePad for hosting and design and MarsEdit for writing and posting. (I have a trial licence for both of them.)

I still don’t understand why I don’t get decent blogging support with the almost one-hundred bucks I pay for my .Mac subscription. This could just be the one thing to convince a few people to renew. Instead, they’re now going somewhere else.

Be that as it may, I settled on these two apps because of their GUI elegance and simplicity behind which hides some pretty powerful stuff. The emblematic application in this fold is NewsFire, which I’ve already mentioned. It does precisely one — quite limited — thing but does it extremely well and in an intuitive and simple way.

Other apps — Tinderbox comes to mind — are intriguing and great to play around with but ultimately confusing and frustrating. If you have a lot of time or are a genuine geek, which I’m not, Tinderbox is great for blogging and, more generally, laying out and storing information. But I lost patience pretty soon, and the ugly GUI just fed into that frustration. Contrast this to DEVONthink, which I use daily, or NewsFire.

(Sorry, too lazy to insert URLs. Find them on Macupdate.)

Sort of like the iPod — easy on the surface, complex inside, but you don’t have to deal with the complexity. Wish life were like that.