Five Across challenges Six Apart

Published on:

Six Apart are being challenged by Five Across (sorry, that one was too funny to miss) with bubbler, another blogging platform. At first glance, Five Across' team doesn't look as young and snappy as its competitor, but they're not exactly novice either. Its CEO is Glenn C. Reid, who "conceived, designed, and implemented" iMovie 1.0 and iPhoto 1.0 at Apple. Surely someone who understands style and ease of use.

Setting up a new blog is done in no time (download the blog editor application for Mac OS X or Windows XP and fill-in a few fields). I've not yet played enough with it to form an opinion, but here are my first look at it.

What I like very much at a first glance is:

  • You have a true desktop application to author, with drag-n-drop and everything you can expect from a modern OS. No web interface, in the blogging space, currently matches that comfort
  • There seems to be an embedded wiki for registered users, I'm looking forward to see how they integrated a blog with wiki

What I don't like or find strange:

  • It says "This is my new home page". Mmmh'kay, clearly mainstream, at least it's not my "personal page" ;-)
  • This thing pretends that I posted the first post that boast the unequivocal endorsement that this is "Very cool." Sorry guys, but that's cheap marketing ploy, not welcome on this side of the blogosphere. (P.S. See Glenn's comment below)
  • Wait until I read the huge fine prints of the license ;-)
  • Where are the permalinks? When I click on Home Page I get a link that sports "pages" in it, when I click on the sole link that sits in the first post, I read "home" in it. Confusing

To summarize my first impression, this tool further confirms what I've been crying out loud for years: a better user interface than web forms, without FUC! And it looks like it wants to be part of iLife, which considering its parents, would not be a big surprise. Meanwhile, posting web pages on .Mac is still so 1999 :-).

See you for another review.