11 Best Blogging apps for your iPad

Even if I trashed the idea of blogging from an iPad at the end of my post “Blogging on the iPad – Yes it’s possible!”, I still believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel for bloggers to write, edit and publish your posts on the go. No more reaching out for a keyboard when you’re inspired on the toilet! Just grab you iPad!

In my previous post, I highlighted the most useful apps that you can use to research an article, write and publish it all from the allmighty Apple tablet. The list isn’t even close to being exhaustive, heck it has just 4–5 apps on it.

So today I’m listing the 11 most useful blogging apps that you may find in the App Store. Some are the same as the last post, others are new. I thought these are the most useful ones, and also the ones I use everyday to give you, my dear readers, what you’re reading on this blog.

Here’s the list! Drum roll, please…

1 – Byword

Already examined in my other post, Byword is a marvel for writing anything. Compatible with iCloud Syncing, Markdown, TextExpander Touch support and a minimalist design plus some ingenious tricks, Byword lets you write in a clean environment with no distraction from less used features like formatting. An export to HTML is very handy to proceed to the next step of editing in another app, such as Blogsy.

2 – Storify

A new web 2.0 outlet for your writings, Storify has a very simple, yet powerful app that lets you pick from social networks and the Internet stories and content shared by people, that you can drag and drop in your own document. You can integrate your social snippets with your own words and voilà! You have a wonderful article of curated content marvelously formatted and ready for publishing on your blog.

3 – Blogsy

Blogsy is, at the moment, the most advanced app for blog management on the iPad today. It can connect with several popular hosting sites like WordPress, Blogger and Posterous, you can write your posts and edit the HTML, take content from Youtube, Flickr, Picasa, Google search results and more and integrate into your post. You can also preview your article and publish it all into a single app. I still like to do the publishing part on my web dashboard of WordPress, because I need to set up various settings available only online. But still, this is a good choice for managing your publishing workflow from an app. Still waiting for MarsEdit for the iPad though…

4 – Evernote

A catch-all service that will store anything you throw at him, including your grandma. Storing audio, video, text, pictures (it will recognize the text in your images), and even full web pages, Evernote is the best way to gather material for your next piece of blog-art. Its nice app is functional and useful, and you can also fill your evernote notebook through Safari or by mailing your notes from another app to your evernote email address.

5 – Instapaper

Found a long article that you want to read and don’t have time right now? Store it in Instapaper! This app will keep your readings for later, downloading the content so that you can also read offline. Very handy when you have a notebook near you and want to take notes from different articles.

6 – Flipboard

Flipboard is your personal magazine on the iPad. Flick through your Twitter stream, Google Reader, latest news and even your Facebook account. You can view several headlines at once, flick through them as you would on a real magazine and you can then share on twitter or facebook, or even mail the item (Posterous anyone?…)
But really, you need to see this to witness and understand its power!

[youtube width="560" height="315"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDARc7jhM8U[/youtube]

7 – ShowYou

Like videos? The Youtube app doesn’t have all the content you need? ShowYou is for you. ShowYou aggregates videos from your social networks into a slick, unified interface. Also you can receive feeds from different categories that you choose, so you will get only the videos you’re interested in from sources you trust. It also has a nice sharing ability: it’s super easy to share to Facebook and Twitter.

8 – Reeder

The best RSS app you can find online. Created from a fellow italian developer, Reeder syncs with your Google Reader account and downloads every content in it in a surprisingly Flash-like speed. Then you can read through your headlines, use readability service to read the whole article in the app and not in another website, send to instapaper, share on Twitter and Facebook etc… The lack of feed management is a big flaw, but all the other features cover for this mistake. Learn to use this app and you’ll be retweeting lots of articles in no time!

9 – Tweetbot

Twitter app on stereoids. Tweetbot has just been released and it already created a tsunami, raising the bar on twitter-client standards. It’s quick and slick, it has been designed to give you every information you need from Twitter. Seriously, this app is powerful. So powerful that it deserves a video to explain its usefulnes.

[youtube width="560" height="315"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfcPXH0W5U[/youtube]

10 – Dropbox

Cloud storage never been so easy with Dropbox. You can share your notes, if you like to keep them on plain text files, between all your devices with instant syncronization and instant accessibility. Dropbox will store any file you want to upload and it will be backed up securely forever. It also has a versioning feature that’s very useful for writers and bloggers.

11 – TextExpander Touch

This app will blow your mind and also leave you frustrated at the same time. Imagine that you have to write the same footer for every article you write. You can create a snippet in TextExpander, fill it with the text you need (including links and format), create a shortcut for that snippet (for example .ft). Whenever you’ll write .ft in an app that supports TextExpander, it will expand that word into the snippet you created before. Huge time saver! Email signatures, article closings, email address and web address you use most often etc… It will leave frustrated though, because not all apps supports TextExpander Touch (expecially all the Apple ones don’t support it) so you’ll find that the snippet you needed in that particular app isn’t available because it’s not supported.

Hope that this list helps you deciding that now is the right time to buy an iPad. Not just because you’ll look cool having it (of course…) but also because it’s extremely useful and handy.

Do you have more apps that you’d like to add to this list? Please write them in the comments below. I always appreciate a good content integration from you readers!

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