Site Update (April 2012) - Blogsy

NOTE: The entire post was composed and created using Blogsy on the iPad.

W♥M on iPad..

I have been searching for an app like this, because the iPhone TypePad application needs a lot of work. One of the main thing I need the application to do is to insert images, along with my text, and there just wasn't a way for you to do this via iOS. Unfortunately, TypePad currently does not offer iOS Safari support (this is terribly frustrating for mobile bloggers).

Unless you know the name (Blogsy), it's hard to find this application in the iTunes store. Searching for "TypePad" or Blog Editor doesn't exactly return Blogsy. There isn't a demo version, so I had to pay $5 to basically test out the application.

I'll admit that I haven't played around with it enough, but one thing I wasn't sure about is how do you save things in draft? I understand that you can save it to TypePad in draft mode, but I want to save it in draft locally on the iPad. Then it turns out that it was automatically saving it locally when I accidentally clicked on the "+" icon and panicked because I thought I had deleted my entry.

The other thing I didn't care for is the way they implement inserting images. You have to "upload" it to your TypePad image icon and then you can insert it into your article. That's a minor complaint, it's just not obvious to me. Even accessing your photo gallery is a pain because you have to allow the application to access location services. Since I automatically disable location, I had to go into my settings to allow this application access.

Some improvements I wish Blogsy had:

(1) Autocorrect and dictionary/spellcheck. iOS offer access to its dictionary throughout its system... yet it sometime works and sometime it doesn't work (this is evident when you flip back and forth to HTML). (2) A better image inserting system. I've used application that has "insert" and then you just select images from your gallery and voila, it's done. (3) Remove certain icons from the dock (could not figure out how to remove these icons).

(4) Once you insert an image, moving it around is not obvious. I had to delete it and then re-insert the image at a different location. I'm sure there is a way to move it around, but I just couldn't figure it out. (5) Allow better HTML editing option. I tried to add some CSS style to the image (adding a 1 pixel border), but Blogsy just stripped it out. (6) Changing the post date to a future date doesn't work - it will publish your article anyway.

Anyway, those are really tiny little complaints. I'm sure 99% of users don't really care about these things because I'm sure they're all WYSIWYG users.

My last mo-blogging misadventure was last year in Canada, so I can tell you it was a lot of work to get around the restriction. Compared to working with Blogsy, it's definitely a lot easier. I am looking forward to a future articles via my iPad.

To end this, I'll test out the video embedding option.