Christian,
You make some very interesting points. I would generally agree about the bloatware comment… generally.
Certainly, an application can become so overloaded with features as to become unwieldy and too broad in purpose as to present a perceptual blank slate to potential users. This can be very confusing (Look at many of the negative comments regarding Tinderbox, for example. It is basically an “environment” and not an application because it is so non-specialized. This tends to confuse new or potential users).
There is only so much “scope creep” that can be effectively managed from a design perspective as well as from a potential user’s cognitive perspective.
I don’t really think that DTP needs to be a publishing application, but it should interface with them. Many of the most effective and well received applications have narrow scopes and interfaces well suited for their narrow purpose. That is, they do one “thing”, and do it well.
Take Scrivener, for example. It is an application designed to manage writing projects. It does not do much in the way of formatting, unlike a traditional word processor. It does allow the user to focus on capturing and organizing information however. Another of it’s strengths is in the flexibility of export formats.
Perhaps this is an area in which DTP could use some improvement. If you are interested, check out Scrivener and the available export options. This seems to be something that the folks at DEVON could implement as well and it might satisfy your needs.
Based on your experience, perhaps you might make recommendations or feature requests of the DEVON folks that would be accommodating and simple to implement?
Alternatively, you might use something like Scrivener to do your writing.
DT has never provided a strong writing environment, beyond creating simple rtf and txt files.
I think that is a smart move because, as noted previously, as an application begins to take on a great many roles, it tends to become more confusing to potential users.
Also, as the developers focus on adding more and more features, they may lose focus on improvements.
Other multi-purpose apps with nice blogging options are MacJournal or Journler. IIRC, They both do blogging. Others have mentioned blog-specific applications as well.
In the past, a great many of us looked to DTP as a holy grail of applications for gathering, analyzing, organizing and writing.
Some of us came to the conclusion that individual tools, effectively focused on relatively narrow feature sets, better fit the bill (though there is the hassle of working with - and purchasing- multiple applications). We adjusted our workflows accordingly.
For example, my workflow does not include two versions of the final work in two different applications. I don’t use DTP for final writing.
For me, DTP is for collecting, managing, analyzing patterns of information. I may enter snippets, notes or observations but I do not perform final writing in it any more than I would write a final report inside any other research database.
I am not suggesting that you must work the way others do, just that some of us have come from the desire for a single, “GUT-type” application and comfortably arrived at a workflow using multiple applications.
If DTP effectively integrated more effective writing/publishing feature set, I would certainly not object and I would likely make use them. Because it does not currently offer these options, it is relatively simple to create a workflow or process that integrates other applications better suited to the task.
I hope this doesn’t come across as too preachy.
cheers
