Playing with Zoundry

I’ve been using Qumana as my desktop blogging app for a while. It’s not bad at all, but as time goes by, it started getting harder and harder to open. I’d launch it, and the launch screen would come up, but the program never really loaded. Plus, it does some things with bulleted lists that reduce me to tears.

So I read some good things about Zoundry and decided to give it a shot. Here’s what I’ve found so far in no particular order.

• If you copy and paste, say, a blog entry title complete with link so you don’t have to waste your time linking to it manually, Zoundry kills the giant header font and pastes it in at the size font you’re using. Nice!
• When you’re highlighting words to link to or format, the highlight jumps more intuitively. I wasted a lot of time and wrist movement trying to keep Qumama from grabbing punctuation marks and other items near the stuff I meant to format.
• The timestamping feature is hidden when you first install it. Don’t be like me and waste 15 minutes hunting: click the blue arrow thingie near the top right corner (at the end of the Tag Words field) to expose the timestamp stuff.
• I rather liked Qumana’s blog manager: a separate window where you could quickly look at your recent posts on each blog. Since I like to post ahead, this helps me keep track of what day I’m up to. Zoundry puts this in a sidebar, and then you have to click the blog, and then you have to click the latest entry to see its stats (like when it posts) in the bottom window. It’s a bit more clicking, but I’ll live.
• It seems to work faster than Qumana and I’m not seeing bugs so far.
• I haven’t played with images, but this guy did and you can read what he said. It looks like it has a great interface for that.
• Keyboard shortcuts for all the things I do most often. Swwweeeet! And you know how you find them? Hover your mouse over the button for the function you want to use and it gives you the shortcut.
• Plenty of pinging options, and it’s easier to configure them than it was in Qumana (my word, that took some time!).
• Initial setup is also easy via our friend autodiscovery.
• When you hit “publish”, it pops up a window to confirm that the pinging services you want are selected (you can change it if not), that the date you’ve chosen is what you want (if you’re timestamping) and gives you an opportunity to post it as a draft, which is a nice option if you need it.

I’m liking it and I’m going to keep using it. I’ll definitely let you know if I run into anything bad, but for free, it’s pretty wonderful.