John Saddington Releases Desk, a Premium Publishing Application For The Mac

Desk is a new $29 desktop publishing application for Mac OS X, developed by John Saddington, aimed at simplifying the publishing experience. Similar to WordPress’ distraction free writing mode, the interface disappears while in full screen mode. When you move the mouse cursor, interface elements appear on the right and lower part of the screen.

The Desk Full Screen Interface

At the bottom of the interface, information such as the time the last draft was saved, character count, word count, and estimated time to read is displayed. Blog posts can either be saved locally as documents or you can connect to an existing site.

Connecting a Site

Connecting a site to Desk is easy. When you launch Desk, click on the Share button on the right, then click the plus icon. Select which platform you use for your site. In this case, I chose WordPress.

The app uses XML-RPC to communicate with WordPress. If you’re using a security plugin, make sure to double-check that XML-RPC is not disabled or else Desk won’t be able to communicate with the site. Once connected, you’ll be able to create new drafts, publish posts, and access content already published from within Desk.

Writing Content in Desk

When creating a new post, Desk has similar options to add post meta information as WordPress except they’re not in separate meta boxes. You can add multiple categories or create a new one. You can also add tags, a custom URL, and a featured image.

Writing content is fairly straightforward. You can either style text using keyboard shortcuts or use a toolbar that appears when text is highlighted. Using the toolbar, you can bold, italicize, and underline text. You can also create blockquotes, links, bulleted lists, and edit the heading size.

You can either write content using Markdown or the built-in WYSIWYG editor. Both are used simultaneously if you’re comfortable using a mixture of the two. Although I’m used to viewing a persistent toolbar, I don’t find highlighting text first to be an inconvenience. Adding media files such as images is a bit clunky.

To add images to a post, you need to drag and drop them into the editor. While this task may be simple to some, I find it cumbersome. I’d like to see the ability to add an image with a button as well as drag and drop. There are a few caveats to adding images using Desk. You can’t link an image to the media file or choose which size to display in WordPress. Another thing to keep in mind is that WordPress does not generate thumbnails for images added via Desk. This is a potential deal breaker for a lot of people.

What a Post Written in Desk Looks Like

Here is a screenshot of what this post looks like written in Desk in the Text view of the WordPress post editor. Below that is a screenshot of what the post looks like inside of Desk.

The Code View of a Post Written in Desk

The Post Content Inside of Desk

I’m not sure why so much extra code is being added to the post. This is an area where Desk and other publishing software have problems. If I write content in an editor outside of WordPress, I don’t expect to correct spaces, missing paragraphs, extra code, etc. Even if it provides a great looking interface to write content, it’s not worth it if I need to spend a lot of time fixing things. If I need to do that, I might as well stick with writing content in WordPress.

Plenty of Room For Improvement

At one point when writing my review, the images I added to the post disappeared. It’s as if their relationship to WordPress was removed. By removing and adding the images in the post, I re-established the relationship.

Desk has a minimal interface, works fine out-of-the-box, but the code generated when creating content is a deal breaker to me. An external publishing application should minimize friction and make the process more enjoyable. Although Desk gets most of the way there, all of the editing I have to do in WordPress after the fact eliminates the joy of using Desk.