I just picked up a copy of Desk.pm after reading about it on HN. At the base, it’s an ingenious, but long overdue idea – an offline/local blog-publishing tool that adopts the style of a focused-writing editor.

I’m very hopeful that this lowered friction will have me publishing more often. Desk.pm is relatively expensive to drop sight unseen ($30 on the Mac App Store) and still quite young, so we’ll see how it works out.

Current Summary (2015-01-27, v1.1 (5)):

• While it has potential, it also has a bunch of deal-breakers for me so I can’t really recommend it right now, but this may change as it gets updated.
  • Basic editing stuff is slightly buggy (paragraphs!) or missing (embeds/source-editing)
  • Publishing model feels wrong
• Be sure to check out the forums: http://talk.desk.pm/c/support/ideas

Here are some thoughts so far (I’ll be adding to this as I use it more)

General:

• The minimal approach is nice, but there probably should be a bit more of a getting started guide (dismissable, of course). Also, there are a lot of hidden options, like spell-checking and some other globals should probably be something that you can set-up on start.
• Changing the blog-post title is a lot less obvious that it should be. It took me forever to figure out that it’s under “Rename…” in the File menu or you need to hover over over the topbar and click to rename. It feels like maybe “Rename…” should be replaced with a “Post Info” palette or something, and that there should be an option for having a Title Bar/Field that can auto-hide or stick at the top (especially useful if there’s support for tags, categories, post-date, what have you).
  
• Publishing is actually more confusing than I’d like as well. Ideally, I’d like to be able to simply see my state and toggle it. For example, here’s how bad/confusing things are.  Currently, I’m editing a new draft that’s saved in a “Blog”.  Great. However, when I go to “Blog > Publish”, it brings up a sidebar where I have to select my blog again, and then use a pull-down to update the status? As far as I can tell, I have to do this every time I want to update my post. It seems like I should only have to set my publish settings for a blog post in a modal once, and simply be able to publish after that. Also, it seems like I should be able to have some sort of auto-publish behavior or barring that, some sort of way to be able to tell when this saved post is different from my published post. (A slick way would be a diffing view I suppose, but something should show my last saved vs last published time and if it’s different at least).

Editor:

• I like the Medium-style inline callouts on selection in theory, but in practice, they’re sort of annoying: I wish I could just disable it. There’s nothing there that I shouldn’t be able to do better keyboard-only.
• Markdown auto-conversion is nice, although I do wish it was a bit more responsive. Hackpad does a better job of doing per-character vs end-of-line conversion.
  
  • BUG: Markdown italics doesn’t appear to auto-convert in the editor although it will work once posted.
• The first thing I did was go to System Preferences > Keyboard > App Shortcuts and add CMD-K for link creation. I don’t know why it’s not the shortcut in the first place. However, sadly, the linking behavior is still a bit broken. If you try CMD-K on an empty selection, it does nothing, which is arguably OK behavior, but if you CMD-K with the cursor within an existing link, it should let you edit it, right? Furthermore, if you create a link with CMD-K and then with the word still selected, try to CMD-K again (say to edit the URL) it fails.
• Doing things like adding an embed are currently impossible. I would have liked to embed a Desk.pm video, for example, but I can’t. As far as I can tell there’s no “manual HTML insertion” ability or any way to extend formatting (personally, I embed Flickr photos a lot in my posts, also I tend to use a fair amount of <blockquote> and <code> tags (<– see how that’d would be useful there?)
  
• Full-screen is nice, but it’d be nice just to have an adjustable defocus/darken feature. 
• It’d be nice to have preview as a split-screen or a sidebar view.
• Has some serious indents on lists. Wish there was a way to style the editor.
• BUG: There is wonky stuff going on with line-breaks/paragraphing…

Keyboard Support:

• In general, Desk is sadly not as keyboard-driven as I would like, and not in a vim-emulation mode either, but lots of little things like the lack of proper focusing when sidebars come up, and less than ideal formatting shortcuts (compare say vs iA Writer), or the way say the linking popup disappears if you use a clipboard manager (I use ClipMenu) or tab out to grab a link. In general, I would just like to be able to use Desk.pm w/o having to touch my mouse, which doesn’t seem like too much to ask, but currently seems impossible.
• I wish there was a Keyboard Help keyboard shortcut (cmd-/ or cmd-?)
• Tooltips should have keyboard shortcuts appended
• Sidebar panes are not keyboard navigable. Since those panes disappear if you type anyway, it seems like focus should change, and you should be able to get out of a pane then by either using the keyboard-shortcut again, Escape, or clicking the main editor pane.