Contributing to the blog

Lately I've found some new inspiration in Adobe's Creative Suite 3. I've been toying around with Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flex and today: Contribute.

More specifically I'm writing this post from inside Contribute :-)

Contribute is an application build to help webmasters, blog owners and the like to keep their website and/or blog updated.

So far, here are some of my thoughts:

• The editor seems nice - better than NeoOffice for the Mac anyay. It has some well built "Insert link" and "Insert image" dialogs! I'll get back and comment on the HTML it generates when this is posted
• A well needed change from the web based interface og Blogger (which works great, but is a bit boring)
• The price tag on the software, I think, will scare off some people. With $169 for a single license, I wouldn't go buy it. I guess people who spend every day maintaining websites may find it reasonable
• The blogging feature is pretty cool. Contribute seems to integrate well into your chosen blogging system. It supports Blogger, WordPress and Typepad out of the box, and other blog servers through the MetaWebblog API
• With my system (Blogger) I'm writing the post in-context (screenshot here)
• I can save a post for finalizing later, as with Bloggers interface. In Contribute there is a list of unpublished posts/pages so you can easily find them again
• As nice as the above sounds, I'm still not convinced when it comes to "normal" websites. I just don't see Contribute replacing real Content Management Systems any time soon. Too many features are missing (user management, extensibility etc.)

Those were some initial ponderings. I will probably get back about CS3 soon ;-)