Qumana vs Live Writer

I've been using Qumana to write my blog posts for the last 9 months or so and it has been fantastic. It saves me so much time when blogging, especially seeing I have more than one blog. I can create posts offline and then publish and then start writing the next post for the next blog without having to login to each site. It has been a real time saver. Plus it's free!

It does have a few bugs though. I would find that if I closed Qumana and then later tried to open it again, it wouldn't open. I'd have to go into the Task Manager and stop the process, which would still be running. This was a small problem which was overcome by not closing the program!

After getting my new computer a couple of weeks ago, which runs on the Windows Vista operating system, I installed Qumana and it was working perfectly. Then 2 days ago it crashed and it wouldn't open again. I tried rebooting, uninstalling, reinstalling but no luck. I suspect it's a Java related problem. It just won't start up. So I had to find an alternative.

I looked at quite a few editors and BlogJet was looking like the way to go but $40 seems a little pricey when there are so many other free blog editors. Then I came across MS Live Writer. Live Writer is free and gets good reviews and so here I am writing my first blog post with my new blogging editor.

Setting up a blog is easy, as with Qumana, and was ready to write within minutes. The best thing so far is that it uses the blogs CSS file so I can see exactly how the post will look. Plus it is faster. I had problems with Qumana where I would type faster than it would recognise what I had done and I'd have to wait for it to catch up to me. That was kind of strange. I don't have that problem now.

Another little thing I like about Live Writer is when highlighting something to create a link. If you try to highlight a word in Qumana by double clicking it it would also pick up the comma or full stop which followed it. That constantly bugged me. That's not an issue with Live Writer.

One negative with Live Writer is that it doesn't detect when I have copied a link. So when I go to insert a link I have to paste it into the dialog box whereas with Qumana it would automatically insert it, making linking easy.

Let's hope all goes well when I publish. Fingers crossed...

Update: Success, it posted, yay!

Another thing worth mentioning is that Qumana used to put an extra line between paragraphs with Blogger. I couldn't figure out why. That problem is no longer, yay again!