Desk

Minimalist desktop publishing comes to the Mac – but is it worth £21?

Blogo 2 attempted to bring one-click blogging to OS X ( MF279), but its featurerich interface got a bit busy – and a bit buggy in the process. Desk takes a different tack by streamlining its feature set and putting the focus squarely on the act of writing.

Blending a minimalist interface aped from iA Writer with broad oneclick publishing support, Desk enables Wordpress, Tumblr, Movable Type, Typepad, Facebook, and even Squarespace blog writers to post their thoughts instantly.

The editing window is a pareddown set-up, with fading borders and updated reading time, character and word counts as you type. Its baked-in blog tools are slick, too: you can hyperlink text, style fonts, embed video, and drag-and-drop images into the editing window to resize and align on the fly, thanks to Desk’s context-sensitive right-click menus. These WYSIWYG features work well with Markdown, so writers can freely mix up the two. Choose a publishing platform from the vertical menu bar and you soon have access to published posts, draft previews and

Desk is a deftly designed desktop publishing client with wide support for bloggers. Recommended.

platform-specific options, like Wordpress categories, tags, slugs, and featured images.

Desk is highly polished and a versatile writing workspace, and its iCloud integration, Day/Night modes and document export options put it on par with most minimalist writing apps. It's not cheap though, so if you only write, try iA Writer. But if you blog, use Desk. Tim Hardwick

Desk makes light work of desktop blogging with minimum fuss.