I am testing a new blogging application called, appropriately enough, Blogo today. It’s a very nice looking piece of Mac software that comes very highly recommended (by Apple no less). I was intrigued enough to take it for a test drive on my MacBook and what you’re reading is the result.

Blogo is as easy to install as any other bit of Mac software. You can download a trial version from the developer’s site (which is what I have done) or directly from the app store.

Once you’ve installed it, you find yourself looking at a traditional OSX layout. There are a number of panels. On the far left is a binder with buttons for things like starting a new post, hiding your other panels, previewing your post, moderating your comments and so on.

To the left of that is a panel containing a list of all your previous posts that are available for editing.

The central panel is where you write your post, add categories and tags, save or publish it. There’s an information panel that contains your word count as well. There’s a little calendar in the top right of this panel that let’s you schedule your posts.

The furthest right panel has a list of your categories.

There are browser extensions that let you send links and videos directly to your post from your browser.

You can schedule posts from within it and you can deal with comments from inside the app.

Where it really scores is managing multiple blogs although that is not all that important to me.

It’s all clean, simple, efficient and pleasant to work with on a MacBook screen. You can drag and drop images into your posts and edit them. That’s a thing I rarely do so I can’t tell you about it. You can synchronise with Evernote and post pretty much directly from it. If you are a compulsive Evernote user this could be very useful. It all works very well indeed.

But would I pay $29.99 for it? Now that is the question. The little blogging I have done of late has mostly been written in markdown and posted from inside Byword and that has worked well for me. As far as I can tell Blogo does not use markdown which is a bit of a negative. (Update 16th October: I have since heard from Gisele, Blogo’s community manager, that markdown is coming soon. That’s a big plus.)

I do like the Evernote integration and the ability to moderate comments. If the scheduling really works I would be very happy since I have struggled to make that work on my WordPress site. (Update: I scheduled this post and it worked perfectly so score one for Blogo!)

I think I’m going to keep using it through the trial period and see how well things go.

Also while I am here I should mention that the Kormak books are finally available on Google Play. So if you have an android phone or tablet you can pick up Stealer of Flesh for free right now.