More trouble than bubble right now, from the looks of it, but you never know where the next great leap in elegance will come from. If you're on the verge of launching the ultimate gaming blog -- or yet another Halo 2 fansite -- you have another entrant to consider in the more-crowded-by-the-day blog hosting field. From a company called Five Across -- rotfl -- comes Bubbler, designed by a former Apple engineer. Bubbler is both a client application and a hosting service.
Besides the somewhat novel first-party client software (Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X versions), Bubbler doesn't sport any features that would keep it from being an excellent intro-to-blogging tool for grade schoolers. Granted it's only in public beta, and I'm sure far from finished, but it still lacks a lot of the things I've come to expect in blogware, even in the early stages. There's presently no mechanism for leaving comments; the templates are mostly fixed with minimal editing support; post organization seems rudimentary at best. I can't even figure out how to keep the thing from publishing my email address next to the personal profile section that I don't want on there either.
Still, Bubbler does have a few things to show off. Like the Reporter feature, a posting mode that does near-real-time blogging, publishing each phrase as you finish it. Sort of like Republican blogging -- you know, line-item posting. The included templates aren't bad; at least two of them are attractive. The Mac version of the client software is clean, simple and does the few things it does well. You can tell the guy behind Bubbler got his feet wet in Apple's consumer software.
Bubbler is free for 30 days. After that, Five Across -- choke, cough, guffaw -- is charging five bucks a month. Five years ago this would have been a neat idea and an ultra-accessible starter kit. But these days even brand new bloggers have learned to expect more. Until the product is made quite a bit more robust, I can't imagine paying for it or choosing it over the combination of ecto2 and TypePad.
[Thanks MacMinute.]
18 av A av A
Posted by: kuwang | 09/25/2006 at 04:39 AM