It’s interesting to me how features are born. For instance, why is there a “drafts” flag for blog entries? Probably because the early blog systems were entirely web driven, and so the only way to save your work was to mark it as a draft and publish.
I think that’s a bit unfortunate, since in some user experiences, draft entries are inter-mixed with published entries, and it becomes difficult to manage your various pieces. For example, when you save a draft in ecto, it is saved on the blog server and listed among the other blog entries, while in MarsEdit, when you save a draft it is stored locally in a Drafts folder. I find the MarsEdit user experience much more useful, since I can instantly see what I haven’t published yet, and can continue to edit.
The new Blogger for Word toolbar does something… interesting. It implements the drafts flag such that you can save an entry from within MS Word to your blog server. The user experience is similar to ecto in that when you go to edit an existing entry, you must look in the Published column to see what’s not published.
So my question for ecto and Blogger For Word is, why would you do this? You’re both desktop tools, you can easily save your work locally. Is there really such a big market of people who need to edit drafts at different machines? Perhaps this is used in some kind of multi-author workflow?