ArticlesWith Brainsnorkel experimenting with Writely, I thought it was about time that I evaluated Ecto as I promised a month ago.
I am going to talk almost exclusively about the user-experience rather than the features of the tool. Why? Because that’s the reason I am giving it the thumbs-down after only the briefest trials. It may be the most powerful tool available, but I will never know because it made life too hard for me in the first 30 minutes.
Naming
To begin with, there is the URL: http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/. It appeared first in Google, but I instantly became suspicious: kung-foo? tv? Is this for real, or is it an attempt to get me to install a trojan. Remember, this is a tool you are asking me to install on my PC, and to enter my blog password. If you manage to 0wn my machine or take over my blog, I am going to look very foolish. After poking around the site for a bit, I decided it was probably okay. I’ll risk it.
<pedant>The spelling of the product is “ecto”. I normally try to honour CamelCase marketing attempts – indeed, I am guilty of it myself, but a leading lowercase letter for a proper noun offends my sensibilities too much. It makes writing about it confusing for the reader – especially when it appears at the beginning of sentences. I have chosen not to respect their capitalisation scheme.</pedant>
The Installation Experience
The tool went through a typical installation cycle. There was a zip file containing a Readme file and an EXE. The Readme file contained contact details and system requirements.
As the installer ran, it stopped to display some “important” information for me to read – it was the history.txt telling me about all the bugs that had been fixed since the last version. That’s not an important file for a new user like me. It’s important for existing users before they run the installer, to decide whether they want to install it or not.
When it got to the end, it offered to launch the application and to display the Readme file. That’s the Readme that has little else but System Requirements – now it is far too late!
The Configuration Experience
Now the pain started. It asked me for proxy details (I guess that’s fair enough… although if you could interrogate my browser and/or the networks proxy auto-configuration scripts, it would be much more flexible for when my machine changes networks.).
It also asked me for a URL and for a username and password. I entered my WordPress password, marvelling at the sufficiently-advanced-technology that was going to figure out what sort of blog software I use, and work out how to log on automatically. That turned out to be a false hope. It had to ask me all sorts of details about my blog software. I now think that the first question was really asking for the username and password for my (non-existent) proxy.
So, I explained that I use WordPress, and it offered to connect via the MovableType API. MovableType? I use WordPress – I just told you that! I looked at the Dropdown list for APIs, and WordPress wasn’t there. I was confused, and MovableType sounded wrong, so I went with Atom, because I know WordPress supports Atom.
That was the wrong choice. I know this, because it explained it to me in terms that I could understand, with clear instructions on how to remedy the error…. NOT! Here’s what it actually said:
Server ErrorThe data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.
Okay, so I figured maybe the default (MovableType API) was right after all. I fixed that up, and the data was successfully fetched. I was away!
Main Application
Well, the main application for Ecto looks very clean and stylish. Simply tree on the left, list of posts at the top, contents of the posts beneath. Maybe this application can redeem itself.
Editing my First Post
I spotted a typo in one of my posts, and immediately tried to fix it in place. No that’s wrong. It is a read-only view. So I right-clicked on the post to select Edit, but it wasn’t in the context menu. So I right-clicked on the title of the post in the list. Nope, no Edit operation there either. Time to search the Menu Bar. Nope, no way to enter edit mode. Turns out a simple double-click on the title of the post was what I needed to do – that, and only that. Hmmm…
I fixed up the typo very quickly, but was disappointed to realise that it wasn’t WYSIWYG, which is why I went to try Ecto in the first place. Instead, it had a preview mode, which launched a small browser-like window to see how it would look with someone-else’s stylesheet. Hey, I can do that already with WordPress. Why do I need this tool?
Validation
One of the options (turned off by default) was the ability to prevent you saving without setting the Categories and Summary first. “Cool,” I thought, “I often forget to set the categories.” So I turned that on.
I started writing this article in Ecto, and at one point I wanted to save the result. It offers to save it to the blog as a draft. “Perfect!” I thought. Until it complained that I hadn’t set the category or summary. “No,” I said, “You should only enforce that when I try to publish not when I try to backup.” Next to the confusing Save icon in the menu bar was another Save icon. I tried clicking on that. No complaints, and I closed Ecto. When I came back, the article was gone – all my beautiful words were no longer in Ecto. Luckily I had copied the draft to a Notepad window first!
Focus-Stealing
The most annoying trick of all – yes, even more annoying that throwing away my words! – is that every minute or two, the focus jumps from the edit window you are in, back to the main window – even as you are in the middle of typing. I don’t care if the main window is refreshing itself for some reason: Don’t Steal My Focus!
Conclusion
Ecto isn’t ready for prime-time yet. It is not without hope – there is clearly some thought being given to the user-interface – it is far from a complete write-off. Also, wasn’t a particularly generous reviewier. I spent precisely zero time looking at help files and online forums and raising support tickets . However, I don’t want to spend any more time on Ecto for another 12 months at least.
Comment by Alastair on October 8, 2005
I’m glad you tried it out, thanks. My blog editor of choice, MarsEdit, is about to be orphaned as a result of its developer being swallowed by a bigger fish. Giving/selling the MarsEdit code to their (now ex-) competitor ecto was seen as a possibility. Now I have an opinion on this.
Some comments:
Comment by Julian on October 8, 2005
Alastair,
Thanks for the explanation about Atom.
Good question about the tree. I hadn’t given it much thought.
I had imagined that it might be a Blog/Article/Comment hierarchy or a Blog/Category/Article hierarchy, but I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.
I just launched it again to investigate. The (hideable) tree represents the multiple profiles (?) and blogs that you can connect to. (Perhaps that is a useless feature for many, but I would find multiple blog support somewhat useful.) The hierarchy doesn’t go any deeper than that, which makes the whole tree concept total overkill for most people. So – basically – it is a waste of screen space. I look forward to your rant.
Throwing the user data away is a major sin, but if it was a predictable bug that I could work around (e.g. turn off the validation step that checks categories), it might not be a show-stopper. Repeatedly stealing my focus every couple of minutes while I am mid-sentence is not something I can work around, and not something I will put up with.
Talking of pedantic, did I mention how the first time I launched Ecto… all right, ecto, it said that I had 21 days left on my license, and the second time I launched it, 2 minutes later, it said only 20 days?
Comment by Richard on October 9, 2005
Pedantic? ‘pedabtic’? I’ll give you pedantic: the slash at the end of that closing pedantry tag is in Windows-ese, and needs switching around to a forward slash. And your headings have irregular punctuation too. [Editor’s note: Fixed, fixed and fixed. Thanks for pointing this out.]
On a related point, just about all the GNU toolchain are named in lowercase. It makes little sense to call it Make, even though that’s what it is, and that’s what it does (hell, it even looks for “Makefile”s by default). Better to use your >code< tags and call it
make, so that it is clear that this is the command you must enter at the shell prompt to run it. The same argument probably goes forecto(although I’m guessing it doesn’t have a command line interface).At least the refresh monster wasn’t simultaneously throwing away your text, as I’ve heard some (very bad, hand rolled) multi-user CMS sites do. I’d ask you what the other save button is meant to do (other than pretend to save your post ,of course), but I’m afraid that would force you to load up this dreaded tool once more.
Comment by Julian on October 10, 2005
Ay, don’t get me started on bloody GNU and Unix programmers who couldn’t find their shift keys with both hands. Similarly, the evils of case-sensitivity in source code is the topic of another article.
ecto isn’t code. (You have no idea how much the look of that sentence irks me!) It is a proper noun being used in a sentence. I think make’s the same. (That sentence has a similar level of irkedness. You have to read it two or three times before you can parse what it means.) I am speaking English, not ksh. I shouldn’t have to mark up the incorrect semantics with the <code> tag.
Comment by Sunny Kalsi on October 11, 2005
I agree that the lowercase ‘e’ is an abomination. lowercase names for things like “make” are fine, though, and I think I’d go slightly insane if I had to do a “Make” everytime. Also, in case you didn’t notice, you need shift to type ‘~’ :). Also, Ctrl, Alt, and Shift are “evil keys” in many ways, because they involve you doing finger acrobatics to get them right. You should only use them when you don’t want people to accidently push them.
I like case sensitivity (in languages like C) because it forces you to be correct, but perhaps the compiler should give you a hint in it’s error message like “perhaps you meant curHops”. On languages with no declarations… hmm… it’s definitely a problem, but case insensitivity is not a good solution, IMHO. One could argue that the actual problem is not being forced to declare your variables.
Comment by Richard on October 12, 2005
Julian, I take your point, and I’d be happier if the lowercase pronouns never escaped from the pc, but bands like silverchair, and several (unmemorable? well I can’t remember any right now) companies have done it, so now is the time to get over your horror at this mode of speech. If you were to imagine that when you say ‘ecto’, you’re talking about ‘paper’, then maybe it wouldn’t irk quite as much, but I’m just not sure this holds up with the whole starting-sentences-with-lowercase-chars issue. Maybe if you switch to calling it ‘it’ when starting a sentence, you could sidestep the issue altogether? 😉
On another note, I thought you could stretch the proper usage of code tags to include program names that you would type on a command line (which is where the afformention shift-key deficient unix-land comes in). When it comes to shell scripting, there’s very little difference between what the user types interactively and what a shell script contains (looping in the interactive shell is just more cumbersome). ksh? I thought you were speaking php!
And as Julian noted that it’s a topic for another article, I’ll comment on case sensitivity on the first blog in the neighbourhood that rants about it 🙂
[Pedantry always comes back to bite you: of course I meant <code> when I said >code<. Lousy explicit < and > escapes. Maybe next time I’ll look at the preview…]
Comment by brent on November 3, 2005
What publishing tool do you use if you don’t like ecto?
Comment by Julian on November 3, 2005
Brent,
After publishing this, I had a play with Semagic, which is made for LiveJournal, but can be used for publishing on WordPress.
It wasn’t bad for writing the initial post, but the differences between LiveJournal and WordPress meant that it tended to chew up posts when it was editing them. (WordPress has some special text-handling (like MarkDown) and automatic paragraph detection, that LiveJournal doesn’t use.
In the end, I went back to typing into edit boxes, and regretting the lack of important features like multiple-undo, using my full-screen size, and spell-checking.
I am still open to other suggestions.