BlogStudio is an iLife-friendly, .Mac-centric blogging application. It is designed to allow Mac users to easily create and publish personals weblogs to their .Mac accounts.

Setting up BlogStudio is very easy - in fact, if you already have a .Mac account configured on your computer, you can get started right away. BlogStudio runs only with .Mac, and so it pulls all of your settings in automatically. You don't need to tell it what server to use, or provide a username and password. Just start up the application, and you are ready to blog.

Once started, BlogStudio provides a main window with a series of buttons to manage your blog, as well as a space with a list of previous entries. The buttons are well-labeled and fairly self-explanatory: New Entry, Category, Delete, Publish, etc. Creating a new entry prompts you with a set of pre-defined blog entry types. Possibilities include General, Photo Album, and Music Album. Based on the entry type chosen, certain features will be enabled for creating a new entry. For example, in the Photo Album entry, there is an iPhoto button. Clicking the button will display a tray which allows you to navigate through their iPhoto albums, choose photos, and resize them as needed to fit in the entry. Every type of entry also has typical spaces to fill in the title of the entry, a description or abstract, and some text.

Publishing your blog is as easy as clicking the "Publish" button - BlogStudio automatically connects to your .Mac account and uploads all necessary files.

The look of your blog is customizable using a set of pre-defined templates. There are 20 different templates to choose from, and you can customize the 'navigation' buttons on each template to link to various parts of your blog. Unfortunately, there is no way to use BlogStudio to create your own templates, or perform further customizations to their existing templates - you must stick to BlogStudio's base templates.

BlogStudio provides its own online documentation in the form of Mac OS Help. Simply go to the Help menu to bring up a searchable help document. This document covers all of BlogStudio's features.

BlogStudio is limited to .Mac users only. You can't publish to your own FTP or web space, or save the files to a local computer. And until you register, you can't publish at all. The .Mac requirement does have one benefit, however - it makes it easy to set up the program, since BlogStudio simply uses your existing .Mac account information. Also, as previously mentioned, there is no way to create your own templates or customize the existing templates.

If you can deal with a limited set of templates, and the .Mac restriction, BlogStudio is an excellent application and will be very comfortable for any Mac user to work in.

All of the contents of this site are copyright 2004 by Peter R. Wood, unless otherwise indicated. Email me if you have any questions.