myTumblr: Bringing Tumblr to the Mac Desktop
Tumblr has become a wildly popular blogging platform for many reasons. It’s easy enough for beginners to pick up in an instant, and powerful enough to customize to your heart’s content.
The online Tumblr interface is surely not lacking, but some users still prefer the feel of a desktop environment. Today we’ll look at an application designed to help you publish to your Tumblr account on your Mac: myTumblr from MOApp.
myTumblr
Like many of the other selections from MOApp, myTumblr is both simple to use and quite thorough in its range of features. Nearly the entire Tumblr experience is seamlessly integrated into a native OS X app that looks and feels right at home on a Mac.
Below I’ll walk you through setting up myTumblr and show you some of its primary features. If you want to follow along and try the app out for yourself, be sure to sign up for a Tumblr account before you begin.
Setting Up
When you open myTumblr for the first time, you’ll be presented with the setup screen. Here you simply enter the information related to your existing Tumblr account. If you don’t have an account, click the “Sign Up” link.
Setup Screen
When entering the “Web URL,” be sure to include the “http://” portion. As I discovered the hard way, if you forget this part of the URL, the publishing features will not function properly.
This window also lets you specify a default FTP server for any images that you upload through the app. When you’re all finished entering this information, hit the “Apply” button.
With myTumblr, you can setup multiple accounts and groups and easily switch between them. This is perfect for anyone with both professional and personal blogs.
The Dashboard
Just like when you sign into your online account, opening myTumblr takes you right to your Tumblr dashboard.
The Dashboard
I was pleasantly surprised to see a dashboard page in the app as I think most developers would’ve stuck to just the publishing features. This is one of many touches that shows that the developer really understands the Tumblr experience and was attempting to build a fully functional desktop version.
Publishing
As with the online Tumblr interface, myTumblr allows you to publish seven unique types of posts: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video. Each post type is accessible from the button strip along the top of the interface.
Text Posts
The text post interface is where you type in your typical blog post entries. Here you have some text formatting options like bold, italic and strike through along with the option to insert a link, image or whatever is currently in your clipboard.
You can enter plain text, formatted text and even HTML into the text editor.
Text Posts
Seeing no alternative to the publish button, I was initially concerned that you couldn’t save a draft of an in-progress article, but it turns out that feature is in fact present. Just click the little drop down menu that says “publish now” and you’ll see a number of other options. You can also click the little Twitter check box to forward your posts as a tweet.
Publishing Options and Snippets
As you can see on the right side of the image above, there’s also a handy snippets feature. As a professional blogger, I was thrilled to see this functionality as there are always snippets of code that you find yourself reusing over and over again.
Image Posts
myTumblr allows you to quickly make an image post using either an image link, an FTP server or by simply uploading to your Tumblr account.
Image Post
Yet another pleasant surprise in this app was the image editing features. Instead of simply uploading a picture as is, you have the option to edit it with a number of tools and image filters including black and white and sepia tone.
Image Editing
Previews and Other Post Types
The other post types work exactly like you’d expect and hold no real surprises. Audio and video posts work essentially like the image post, sans the editing features.
Quote, link and chat posts all allow you to quickly create and publish just as with the text post; options for saving as a draft, adding to your queue and posting to Twitter remain active.
At any time throughout the creation of a post, you can see a preview by clicking on the little eye icon in the bottom left.
Post Preview
As you can see, the post preview shows all your images, text formatting and live HTML. Unfortunately, you can’t preview the post with your theme. A “preview in browser” option would go a long way here as the default Tumblr preview does in fact show the post in your selected theme.
My Thoughts
As I do with any application I review, I was constantly thinking up features that I wish were present in myTumblr. However, unlike many other apps, this one continually surprised me by staying one step ahead of my expectations.
Nearly every time I thought, “I’ll bet it doesn’t have…” a little bit of digging revealed that it did. This application is simply an excellent implementation of Tumblr on a Mac and contains just about everything you both want and need.
My single complaint was that the previews were a little lackluster and could therefore use the option to preview in the browser using your installed theme. Otherwise the app performed wonderfully during the review process and I highly recommend it to any Tumblr user.
Conclusion
To review, myTumblr is an amazing and easy way to manage and post content to your Tumblr account from your Mac. At just under $15, this app is perfectly affordable for any professional blogger, but might be an unnecessary expense for a casual Tumblr user.
Regardless of whether or not you plan on buying the app, I recommend downloading the demo and giving it a try for yourself. Leave a comment below and let us know that you think of it.
If you prefer other blogging platforms over Tumblr, also check out myBlogEdit from the same developer.
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