Desk 3

Popular WordPress app gets a reboot

$19.99 Developer John Saddington, desk.pm Requirements OS X 10.10 or later

The much admired Desk app has been redesigned and recreated with macOS Sierra in mind. It’s attractive to work on, and powerful too. Desk is designed to make writing for WordPress a pleasure. It has a clean, simple interface, shortcuts to speed up common tasks, a range of modes to suit particular preferences, and it makes even the most ill-thought-out blog post look amazing. It saves work offline, automatically backs up to iCloud, supports multiple WordPress blogs, and makes it easy to embed media. It can also be customized for specific designs – for example, you might want to specify featured images, categories, or tags for your content on one site but not on others.

It’s clear that the developer is a prolific blogger: the app offers both WYSIWYG and Markdown editing, real-time previewing, word counts, and estimated reading times. There are a few odd choices. For example, the font options and style definitions don’t appear in the Edit or Format menus; you need to right-click the post to see them. The app also crashed on us every time we tried to export as PDF.

THE BOTTOM LINE. Desk 3 is a powerful writing tool for WordPress, but we found it to be crashy.