As a newcomer to blogging, I'm still not sure as a user which of the many desktop blog-management tools I prefer. But as a developer of server-side implementations - which means a frequent tester - I have had some experience. I would very much like to see a good open-source client for every platform, but it is a lot of work to make one of those things feature-complete against all the APIs (and all of the implementations of the APIs :o) so it may take a while.

For me, ecto stands out as the best OS-X client app, and well worth the £10 it costs. It integrates well with bbedit, plays well with my categories, and allows very simple gestures for getting images up and into the entry. Since I never had that much trouble getting images up and into content (I always have powerful management tools open), this says a lot: ordinary users are going to find that this makes all the difference. WYSIWYG is not important or even appealing to me, but ecto seems to do a decent job of simple styling.

ecto also has a Windows port, but my colleague Steve Tufail says that the Windows version is not very usable, and prefers other Windows clients.

I'll be back with more to say on this issue later...