So problem solved right? Just format your drive as a FAT32 drive and you can swap files all day long between Macs and PCs. Well not so fast. First, note that I said on a newly formatted drive FAT32 is faster. However, files get what we call fragmented over time. They get spread out into different areas of a hard drive as it fills up and then as files get deleted. NTFS actually is better at file integrity and reliability than FAT32.

Second, and the major problem with FAT32 formatting, as it relates to new media, is that the maximum file size is 4GB. So if you plan to do video editing, you will run into this limitation on a FAT32 hard drive. Capturing digital video, such as from a Mini-DV tape, takes up about 12GB per hour of video. Depending on what software you are using to capture the video, it may fail in an elegant, or not so elegant way. You should then convert or format your hard drive to NTFS.

Now that introduces some issues with Macs in that they can read data off of an NTFS formatted drive, but that can’t write to them. That obviously can be a major inconvenience. There is a solution in the form of freely available software known as NTFS-3G. The free version for Mac OSX includes the MacFUSE software that gets installed as part of the package (it used to be something that you installed separately). The most reliable way to prepare the hard drive is to completely reformat the drive using the Disk Utility software in the Applications/Utilities folder on the Mac (after installing NTFS-3G of course).

Format the drive to use the Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G) as shown above. This obviously takes a little bit of planning ahead as you will wipe out whatever is currently on the drive, so back it up! Hope this helps all you Mac and PC people to come together and holds hands – for as long as you can stand it.

Now that I’m on the Mac I have found Blogo. It allows me to do many, if not all of the things that WLW allowed, and does it in the Mac drag-and-drop way. The best feature by far is the support for sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Simply go to the site page that your video or image is on and click the “Send to Blogo” bookmarklet in Safari or Firefox (instructions on how to create the bookmarklet are simple and available from the Help menu). A placeholder image appears in the editor window. You can preview how the video or image will look by using the Preview button. You can then see exactly how things will look in your blog, and then you can make any changes before you publish.

You can also drag-and-drop text from a text editor into Blogo, and you can even add blockquotes easily by highlighting text in a web page and clicking the Send to Blogo bookmarklet (it even includes a link to the source automatically).

Blogo’s interface is designed to let you take your mind off the details and just write.

link: Blogo: The blog editor for your Mac

You can enter tags and/or categories in a post. They are entered into a single field in the editor window, and you distinguish categories from tags by using a hashtag before the category name (ex. #newmedia). It will even pick up your categories from your blog and offer them in a drop down menu.

It can publish to many platforms including Blogger and WordPress, and you can set up multiple accounts to post to. It’s not free like Windows Live Writer (it'll cost ya $25 US), but I think it’s quicker and easier, and it produces cleaner code in WordPress. One less reason to miss Windows (that was for the Bava).