Product Reviews

Blogging is more popular than ever, but setting up and maintaining a fully-featured blog can be tortuous. Blogwave Studio is an attempt to make blogging more user-friendly by allowing you to edit your blog and upload it to a .Mac web page with a single click.

The program's main window provides a list and preview views of your blog entries, and it caters for those who divide their blog into more than one section by offering the ability to navigate between separate categories.

Designing a layout is easy: a click of a toolbar icon opens the Theme window, where you can preview a number of templates. These look good, but lack configuration options: you're limited to a selection of navigational tabs, which automatically correspond to any categories you've created. You can alter the positions of common sidebar page elements, such as recent posts and links, but we couldn't find a way to edit the HTML behind the templates. But you can add extra code

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for headers, footers and sidebars and amend styles for text elements on the page via a built-in CSS editor.

It's a pity that when it comes to writing an entry, BlogWave is clumsy. You have to navigate a choice of entry styles - general entry, photo, music and movie albums or file-sharing - before creating each entry. BlogWave's general entry option handily lets you mix text and photos in one post, but each paragraph must be entered separately by clicking the Add paragraph button at the bottom of the window.

To its credit, BlogWave integrates extremely well with iLife applications. Depending on whether you choose a movie, music or photo album-based blog entry, BlogWave displays the contents of the corresponding iMovie, iTunes or iPhoto library in the entry window's drawer, and their contents can be added to a blog entry by dragging them over the entry window.

BlogWave produces polished, easily navigable blogs, complete with popular blogging features. For example, the program links directly to the third-party Haloscan comment server, so visitors can leave messages on your BlogWave-created site.

There are limitations that may restrict its attraction. Although a calendar appears in the main window's drawer, there's no way to add one to completed pages - a strange omission given that calendars are perhaps the best-known way to navigate blogs.

If you're a .Mac subscriber and you need good-looking results quickly, you might fall in love with BlogWave Studio. However, its restrictions mean romance may be fleeting.