As I said in my previous post I am currently away on holiday and have only brought with me my iPad, rather than a laptop of some description. Over the next couple of posts I am going to look at the apps that I have been using for various different tasks, starting with blogging.
I have a couple of blogs and post to each on an irregular basis. When I am at home I use Windows Live Writer which, in my opinion, is the best blogging app by far and is the only reason I continue to run parallels on my Macbook.
The iPad strikes me as the perfect blogging platform with its big screen capable of working with text and pictures (which I will cover in more detail tomorrow) and therefore I was disappointed with both the choice and the quality of the blogging apps on offer.
I used three “apps” to try and find the best fit for me and these were: Blogpress, a third party iPad application which supports multiple platforms (including WordPress, Blogger and Typepad). WordPress’ native iPad application, which only supports WordPress and a dedicated, web-based, mobile interface for WordPress.
It was immediately obvious that all three suffer from the same problem – they are little more than simple text editors. You get zero control over the look and feel of the text, for example, you cannot embolden or italicise text, nor can you change the justification. This I can live with as it is not a major issue for me. What I found most frustrating though was the inability to be able to hyperlink some text or to paste in a link and have it converted. This seems a glaring omission that I hope is rectified in a future release.
Both Blogpress and WordPress are supposed to offer facilities to insert pictures and to save drafts locally for future updates. Here Blogpress wins hands down on both points. While the picture handling is basic you do get a variety of options for where you want to upload a picture to, including Flickr, and this works faultlessly. I have never been able to get the WordPress app to insert a picture – it always crashes.
One thing that the WordPress app does do that Blogpress does not is allow you to see and manage comments and if you get many this may be a time saver for you but if it is blogging you are interested in then Blogpress is for you, even if it is not free.
