Ecto is without question the best offline blogging tool available on the Mac, and after a long wait the v3 beta was made available last month. I’ve tried a lot of these tools and Ecto offers the best combination of power features, ease of use, and productive points of integration (e.g. the Amazon helper).

I was hoping for a better method for handling tags; I don’t like the way the UI adds new tags and selections, would much prefer a dialog box that I could pop up and add the tags into manually. The media handling options are still best in class and that alone makes this a must have tool for bloggers who like to use offline editors.

One interesting note, the most prolific blogger/journalist I know is Dan Farber and he doesn’t use an offline editor, he uses WordPress’ online editor, so while offline tools do provide a lot of nice features they don’t provide much more than what you will get online. I’ve also seen a number of long time bloggers who use textpad and insert HTML tags manually, which further supports the notion that online/offline/dedicated/general purpose tool decisions are ultimately just personal preference.