Blogger on the iPad - Part 1

I love my iPad mini - in fact, I find myself using it more and more for most of my day to day work and even my home business work. Now that I have a Zagg keyboard for it as well I find it even easier. Some of the research I've been doing over the last few months is on what the best Blogger app is for the iPad. Blogging on the iPad is convenient and works great if you're traveling or on the move. Frankly, I hate carrying around a laptop on vacations and have fully adopted my both my iPhone and iPad for any remote work.

That said, there still are some problems with using Blogger mobile apps. The iPad mini is small and compresses your screen size significantly. Additionally, viewing web sites or using online tools becomes more problematic due to the sites switching to mobile modes which can be reduce usability especially for those sites that have been designed for full laptop or desktop work.

Google's Blogger Tool for iOS

I must say I was excited to see that right away Google had created an iOS tool (version 2.1.7.2) for both iPhone and iPad specifically for Blogger that was free in the App Store. I immediately downloaded it and began trying it out.

Well, I have to say it didn't go very well. There are a number of problems with the tool besides just not having the amount of flexibility you get with the web interface we all use today. In fact, I'm writing this post using the Google iOS app right now at the dining room table with the Mini and Zagg keyboard. 

First issue is the default font size for posting. Right now my eyes are going completely buggy due to the very small posting font. There are no settings that allow you to directly alter this. What really bothers me the most about that is you're stuck either using this post editor with tiny fonts (the larger iPad might work a bit better), or, you have to use an external editor such as Write 2, Write for iPad, Notability or even Evernote to get a comfortable size.

Next, is the capability of the editor itself. It is severely limited in functionality. As you can see here the only thing I can do within the post is to create bold text with italics and/or underlined. That is all you can do - you can't alter the foreground or background color, the font, or this size. My first reaction was to alter the HTML of the post itself. But, Google declined to even have that feature. 

Amazingly, you cannot even highlight some text to create a hyperlink.In fact, I had to use an external html editor in order to copy / paste this into this post. This seems to be the only way to get html into your posts. So, if you need special html within, you must find an iOS app in the App Store that allows html editing.

Thankfully, you can add photos to your posts but even that feature is very limited in scope:

As you can see from this picture taken right now just how limited the photo functionality is. First, I cannot adjust the size. This tool just blasts a full image across the post (In fact, I had to re-adjust this image to fit properly - if your template isn't standard the mobile photo upload probably will cause you issues). So, no matter the size of the photo it will be placed dead center in your post. Second, there are no additional justification, caption, alt text or border settings to allow any creative work.

You can save a post as a draft and then publish it later. Also, you can add keywords to the post itself. However, without any template adjustments, post adjustments, html editing or photo editing this app is sorely lacking and can only really be utilized by the most casual user for things such as travel blogs or family photos.

I have to stop this post now because I'm truly getting a headache. Once I had discovered the flaws in this iOS app I decided to find another blogging app that might give me a better user experience for Blogger on a mobile platform. In my next post I'll be reviewing a much, much better iOS app that really does what Google should have done for mobile posting.