One of the great strengths of the Hive ecosystem is that so much of the functionality has alternative options. This includes the different front ends. It gives users the ability to choose which front end most suits their way of working, and provides redundancy in the event that one has a technical issue.
That redundancy is exactly why I normally post from PeakD. When I first joined Hive, I used Ecency, but when they had a problem with their image server, I switched to PeakD and found I liked it more.
Now, I've very kindly been gifted a month of InLeo premium by @leo.tasks (thank you !) so I thought I'd try using the InLeo front end a bunch more for a few weeks to see how I get on and learn more about it.
Screenshot by me of this very screen before I started typing
My initial impression is that from a technical perspective it is smooth and does what it does well. I haven't had any significant glitches of any kind, which is good, but the text editor is more primitive than Ecency or PeakD's. This particularly applies to the bullet points and numbers buttons, where you have to plan ahead and trying to apply them retrospectively just messes up the formatting to the point where it's usually easier to start the post afresh.
There are a number of pieces of functionality which PeakD has that I use on a daily basis that I haven't yet found in InLeo. I'm not sure if it's that they don't exist, or do exist and I just haven't found them yet. If it's the latter, I'd welcome any help anyone can offer to help me locate them !
Things I haven't found yet are;
- A button to add links, with fields for the link itself and display text. While it's possible to put links in using markdown, it's a bit clunkier.
- The ability to select which image will be the thumbnail if you've got more than one image. It's in the "Advanced" options in PeakD and Ecency, but I haven't found it within InLeo.
- Snippets. I've got a few things I use really regularly (banners, dividers, end text etc). While I could just keep the code for these in Notepad, it's handy in Ecency and PeakD having them immediately to hand.
- Templates. This is something that I only found recently in PeakD, and they make it significantly faster to create posts that I do regularly, by enabling me to set up which community they go to, the tags, any standard images and as much or little text as I want.
- Saving multiple drafts, and being able to pick any of them up at a later date. It's possible this might be in InLeo, it's something I haven't looked for yet, but something I use quite a bit in other front ends.
It's possible that some or all of these might be in the roadmap for future development (assuming it's not just me being dumb and not finding them...). But with the drive to reward only content that is directly published within InLeo - see this post - https://labs.inleo.io/@leofinance/major-changes-to-how-hivers-can-earn-leo-tokens I hope they aren't too far in the future.
My overall view is that InLeo is competent and reliable, but is at present some way behind PeakD in terms of functionality, user friendliness, and the ability to organise a posting workload.
I can see myself still primarily using PeakD, and using InLeo to publish more business-oriented posts that I've templated and drafted within PeakD.
But InLeo is changing at a breakneck pace in all kinds of good ways, so if the missing functionality is created I can see myself picking whichever front end is most aligned to the community I'm posting in.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha