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A few days after the entire service had a redesign, Blogger now has something users have been waiting for for a while: an official iPhone app. Google has released the Blogger app to the App Store, and it's now available for download. The app allows you to do everything you'd expect with the Blogger service, including save, edit, and publish posts, as well as uploading pictures and adding location information. It appears you can't edit any of your templates or HTML, or even manage comments from the app, so this isn't a full-service setup, just a way to quickly post from the road on your blog. There's no iPad version, either, though there are quite a few iPad apps out there that do support posting to Blogger directly. Having an official app like this will probably be enough for a lot of people, especially for a relatively simple CMS like Blogger. The Blogger app is of course available for free. Read More

When I was tasked to write a roundup of iPad blogging apps, I figured this would be the usual pros and cons of four or five apps. Instead, I found only two, one of which is specific to WordPress (see our disclosure below). Since neither of the two apps made me all that happy, the multi-app roundup I was hoping for instead became a case of “two apps enter, no app leaves.” Blogging on the iPad is a sorry state of affairs — I’m also coming at this from the angle of a prose blog, not a photo blog. Both WordPress and BlogPress allow you to do the same basic features: type in your thoughts and press publish. Neither of the apps let you define links or format your text — you’re limited to plain style. Some of this, I am led to believe from researching other apps with the same problem (Evernote), is how restrictive Apple is on its rich text features. On the other hand, all of the Office-style apps out there let you format text, so I don’t know what’s up. What I do know is, neither of these two apps even come close to the feature set most bloggers need. As the official app for WordPress, it’s a sad commentary when the best I can say is, “Some of the time, it doesn’t crash. And it’s free.” A quick five minute double-check of some features yielded four crashes. It crashed inserting a picture. It crashed while canceling edits. I wouldn’t be surprised if it crashed while crashing. When I was able to successfully insert a picture, it didn’t show up in the local draft; I had to go out to the local view to see it, and even then it was just code, not a visual. You can, however, manage comments, pages, and assign categories within the WordPress App. I was also impressed with its offline features. It cached previous posts which made it handy to reference what I’d  said about a topic. In addition to the hearty, “It crashes less” feature, BlogPress also connects to Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, Movable Type, TypePad, Live Journal, Drupal and Joomla in addition to WordPress. If you’re not using WordPress, BlogPress is the only game in town for you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t connect to Tumblr. I had a lot more success with this app, even within my WordPress-hosted sites. For Read More

Today is Tuesday, which means we have another brand new Applist ready for you to check out just as promised.  Remember, we will be publishing new Applists every Tuesday and Thursday, and we will be announcing them on the homepage just like this.  So mark it on your calendars or make a mental note, because this will probably be the last time we remind you of the schedule. Today’s Applist features apps that will hopefully help all of you bloggers out there keep the content streaming to your readers even while you are on the go.  The days of lugging your laptop around just to be productive are behind you, because all you need is your iPhone or iPod touch and a handful of these apps: Now head on over to the Apps For Bloggers Applist and see why these are must-have apps for the mobile blogger. Don’t forget to check out our wide variety of other Applists while you are there. Read More