Review: Article Architect for Mac

Ambitious but Flawed Software

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I wanted to love Article Architect. It is well-thought-out for the most part, it enbodies one of the most important methods of Internet marketing, and it supports the Mac platform. However, it has some flaws that will rule it out for many Mac-based marketers, at least as far as its primary mission goes, the writing of articles.

The philosophy upon which the software is founded is sound. It is all about writing (or rewriting) articles to generate unique content for your website or blog, getting free promotional links by submitting them to article directories, posting to social networking sites like Squidoo and HubPages, turning them into e-books, and just generating a large amount of original, unique content for the search engines to latch onto. It does this without relying on methods of dubious value, such as “article spinning,” or the creation of computer generated text (which usually reads like computer-generated text).

Sound article writing workflow

Intended to be a Swiss Army knife of article writing, the software walks you through the process of generating unique content. You begin by clicking the “New Article” button at the top of the main window. This brings up a word processor-like window in which to begin writing. There is also a “Focus” command that blanks out your screen except for your writing window to allow you to concentrate better, like a similar feature in Apple’s pages.

Installation of Article Architect is straightforward

But you’re going to need some content for your article. For this purpose, the software includes a built-in web browser. Type in the subject of your article, and the software will allow you to search a number of search engines for related content. When you find a paragraph of interest, you can highlight it and then drag it over to a little floppy disk icon which will save the snippet of text to a text file. Continue doing this until you feel you have completed enough research for your article.

This is all based on the truism that if you get all of your information from only one source, what you write is considered plagiarism, but if you get it from a number of different sources, it’s considered “research.” Needless to say, you can't use any of the text snippets you have found “as is” in your article, and your sources should always be credited.

Once you have gathered all of your text snippets, however, you can import them into a new blank article window and begin writing. Or, you can start off with a PLR article as the foundation of your writing. (For those who don’t know, PLR stands for “Private Label Rights” and refers to article-length content to which you can purchase republication rights. You can also rewrite, combine and repackage PLR material for your own purposes.)

Article Architect also has a handy article rewriting feature. Choose “Rewrite Article” from the Edit menu, and you will be presented with a dialog box that displays the current article one paragraph at a time, with a pane underneath each allowing you to write your own version.

I have tried this feature and found it to be a sound concept. The “one paragraph at a time” feature allows you to focus and concentrate on the rewriting process without feeling overwhelmed. Rewriting of PLR material, by the way, is important, since search engines such as Google give priority to new, fresh, unique material.

Article submission tools

When your article is written, Article Architect will store it, along with your others, under various categories that you can define. Finally, when you’re ready to submit your articles, Article Architect will help you as well, by using its built-in web browser to help you submit your articles to various article directories. You simply enter your login information for each directory into Article Architect, which stores your name and password and the URL for each.

Article Architect main window

To submit your article, you simply right-click on it in the articles list and choose “Submit To Directory.”Article Architect will load the chosen directory site and log you in with your stored password. Then, assuming you have properly tagged each of your articles with your bio box, a summary, keywords and so on, you can merely tab to each field on the directory submission form and have Article Architect load the appropriate information onto the clipboard so you can simply paste the relevant data into each field.

It is much faster than keeping all of this information in a separate text file, and having to switch from that to your article, to a web browser and back again for each bit of information you need to enter. Article Architect’s built in web browser is speedy and performs adequately.

Keyword research

Article Architect originally had a keyword research feature that used the free version of WordTracker to help you find optimized keyphrases for your articles. When you find a phrase that a large number of people are searching on but few other competing sites offer, you could use this as a foundation of your article, and incorporate it into your article’s title. The developer removed this feature, at least for now, because it used unapproved methods of accessing WordTracker (you can still research keywords, of course, on the free version of WordTracker in Safari).

Article Architect will tell you how many times you are using a key phrase in your article body. It will also keep a live word count to keep you appraised of how many words you still need to write.

The software seems stable and has a number of safety features designed to keep you from losing any of your work. There is an auto save feature, and lest you feel that the articles that you have so painstakingly created will be trapped in a piece of third-party software forever, there is an export function that will allow you to export, whenever you like, every article you have ever written in the software as separate text files into the folder of your choosing.

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Article spinning

The latest version of article architect (3.X.) includes an article spinning feature. I am not a big fan of article spinning, because it usually produces substandard articles, and in fact the creator of article architect was originally opposed to it as well. However, he built a usable spinning capability into the software, perhaps due to customer demand.

To create a spun article, you must set it up first. To do so, you context-click on the word of an existing article in the article window and choose Synonyms. The synonym picker comes up with a long scrolling list of synonyms that you can choose from. The list is very long because many words have multiple meanings. For example, the word "well"can mean a state of healthiness or it can mean something that you get water from. The list of synonyms in the Synonym Picker are not divided according to their meaning, but they certainly are comprehensive — there are usually at least 100 synonyms available for most words.

After doing this for every word in your article that you wish to vary, you choose Spin Article from the Edit menu. You can then save each spun variation as a separate article. The spinning feature is basic and will not divide the spun articles into differing numbers of paragraphs and other tricks that prevent article directories from detecting them as spun articles, but it is at least there if you want it, and it also shows that the developer is willing to update the software in response to customer demand.

Flaws and ommissions

So what’s not to like? Unfortunately, a few bugs and glaring omissions mar the interface. The calendar on the main screen which shows you which days you have written articles blanks out the moment you click anywhere in the Article Architect interface. The program doesn’t support any of the Mac OS niceties such as integrated spellchecker (although the software does have its own spellchecker) contextual access to the Mac dictionary and thesaurus, auto complete, etc. In short, the software feels like a Windows port and it is.

Undo menu is present but grayed out

The most glaring omission, however, is the lack of an undo feature in the article writing window. I’m not talking about lack of multiple undos, I’m talking about a lack of any undos! Unfortunately, apparently the toolkit that allows software programmers to incorporate features like undo is expensive and so the developer has not incorporated the feature into the software, at least in the Mac version. It is astonishing to me that a piece of software Intended for the writing of articles has an adequate web browser but lacks a basic feature like undo.

The software is not worthless, however. The article submission feature is a nice time saver and can help you submit your articles even if you don’t write them in Article Architect. The software has an “import” feature that will allow you to import a folder full of articles that you have written and saved in plain text format in another piece of software, such as Text Edit.

True, the software won’t help you much if you want to submit your article to hundreds of directories, but I suspect this is of dubious value anyway. All you really need to do is submit your site to the main article directories in order for them to be recognized by the search engines, and there you reach a point of diminishing returns after that. In other words, submitting your article to 100 directories above and beyond the top 10 will not get you 100 times more traffic; more likely it will only produce about 1% more traffic.

It was like in the olden days before the dominance of Google and a couple of other search engines. Submitting to 100 search engines was never likely to get you much more traffic than just submitting to the top three or four.

As far as Article Architect goes, it’s a good concept but a flawed execution. I appreciate the software for supporting the Mac but I do not think discriminating Mac users will be very satisfied with it as a writing tool.

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