Qumana 3.0 for the Mac is a disappointment

I have been using Qumana’s blog editor for the Mac for a little while now and prefer it to other blog editors. Qumana released version 3 of the blog editor after a series of about 5 beta versions and based on the beta versions, I had really high hopes for the the final version. Unfortunately I was really disappointed when I downloaded the release version and found that many of the features just didn’t work. So I switched back to the memory hogging beta 5 and used that.

There was a post on the Qumana blog about a month ago confirming that the final release version wasn’t working with Mac OS X:

We’ve gotten some reports and have confirmed that the latest version of Qumana and the lastet version of OSX aren’t playing nice together. We’re working on the fix and will have a new version of Qumana for the Mac out as soon as possible.

Keep an eye on the blog for updates.

So it has been a month and there have been no updates to the blog that I could see (I do subscribe to the blog) and Qumana has been uncharacteristically unresponsive to my efforts to contact them through their site to find out what their progress with the blog editor is.
This morning I thought I’d take a chance and download the release version in the hope that they have fixed it and perhaps didn’t let anyone know and everything seemed to be working just fine until I tried to insert an image into a blog post, only to find that the button is just there for decoration. It doesn’t actually do anything. Now you may be wondering why this is an issue for me? Am I not just being a bit too pedantic? Not really, I use images a lot in my posts and not being able to add them at the click of a button is an issue for me. Is it an insurmountable problem? No, I’ll just have to work out how to hand code the insertions I like to do and do them in "Source View". On the other hand, it is a problem and while I accept that there may be technical issues involved in making the necessary repairs, I don’t accept that Qumana doesn’t give updates or feedback.

I don’t really see myself moving to another blog editor (at least not until ecto 3 comes out – it might be worth switching back to) so this isn’t a rant to be followed by me storming off to ecto for future posts. This is just me saying that I am not happy with how Qumana has handled this.

Update:
The following was just posted to the Qumana blog:

For the last 8 weeks or so we’ve known about and have been searching ways to resolve the problems which showed up the most recent Mac version of Qumana, with OS X 10.4.7+ …

I think we are just about there in terms of being able to offer users a new release for the Mac that operates pretty effectively … so far I have found just one instance of quirkiness (a previous post that did not fully refresh) on one of the various blogs I maintain for testing purposes.

Thus far I have tested posting to WordPress, Typepad and Blogware platforms … mixed results. Typepad fine, Blogware fine, and I knew WordPress would not publish the Q-Ads I inserted … but I was not prepared for it to ignore the YouTube html.

So, with a bit of fair weather following the pretty substantial snowfall here in Vancouver, we should be able to post a link to the new version of Qumana for Mac within the next 24 hours.

We will also update the download link on the Qumana website.

Holding thumbs …

Update 2:

A new version has finally been released.  To download the new version go to the download page.

Technorati Tags: blog editor, buggy, disappointed, faulty, images, no feedback, qumana, unresponsive, version 3