TypePad’s Big Improvements To User Experience: Ha!

After a much touted, long awaited upgrade of the user experience at Typepad, I have to state that I am underwhelmed.

As just one tiny example of absolute UI stupidity that refuses to die, consider the date interface below.

TypePad - Edit Post, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Imagine for one minute that you’d like to date a post, say 16 December 2006. This interface does not allow you to simply type in the date. You have to click the tiny little button, going back one month at a time, until (eventually) you get to December 2006.

Here’s the identical dialog from Blogo, a brand new blog editor for Mac, that works with Typepad:

Blogo, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Note that they have sensibly included a way to let be simply type in the date I want instead of implementing this in the absolutely stupidest way possible.

And it’s not like I haven’t mentioned this. My request for a fix to this goes back several years.

The basic enhancements to Typepad seem to center on an ‘improvement’ of the editor. But for me, it’s all a pain in the neck.

I had given up on trying to use Rich text formatting, because it would never work as I wanted. So, until this ‘upgrade’ I had simply set my default to editing directly in HTML, but with line breaks converted, so that I wouldn’t have to type paragraph markers. In the old editor, it actually remembered my settings. Now, I have to select HTML editing and ‘convert line breaks’ every single time I create a new post. The old notion of a default has gone by the board.

So, why did they spend so much time on something seems so minimal?

Meanwhile, I have been using more sophisticated blogging models, like Tumblr. How come I can’t select a photo and some text on a page and have a Typepad bookmarket that will upload the photo? With Typepad, I still have to download the photo to my harddrive, or capture the screen with Skitch, and then manually upload. (Actually, I route through Flickr: even though it seems like an extra step, I have better control of the photo layout using the Flickr markup. And I when I move from Typepad, which I am trying to do now as quickly as possible, my image URLs all point to Flickr, and not some file directory in Typepad.)

Since I have moved my comments off Typepad to Disqus, and keep all my photos on Flickr, all I rely on Typepad for is the editing experience and the hosting. Looks like I might be using Blogo for the editing, since the new, improved editing experience is so primitive.

I am really contemplating moving all my www.stoweboyd.com blogs to Tumblr, if I could just get the URLs to work so that I wouldn’t break any links.