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| Blogsy App Icon |
What's missing from blogging platforms? Visual appeal. What's missing on the iPad? An app for bloggers.
Well not anymore. Blogsy is an iPad application for bloggers that fills a very useful (not to mention empty) niche in the App Store.What you can do with Blogsy
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| Blogsy Photo Upload Screen |
To the average user, this may not seem like a great application in terms of functionality, but to an avid blogger this is a potential gold mine. After months of searching for a good blogging application that is both visually appealing and capable of catering to my blogging needs, I found that Blogsy is pretty much the only app that fits the bill.
Unlike many other apps in this genre, Blogsy is a great app that is capable of doing everything I need it to be capable of doing. It allows me to browse the web while I write. It let's me choose photos from my iPad or my Picasa / Flickr account. And it can post to multiple blogging platforms, so if I ever need to change mine, I don't have to give up Blogsy.
Aside from this, here are some of the best features of Blogsy:
- Multiple Platforms - Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, you name it, Blogsy has it.
- In-App web-browsing (while writing). Particularly convenient for those who want to research a little while blogging.
- In-App email. Aside from the more obvious use of this feature, it is also useful in that it enable you to email to post to services that are not blogsy supported.
- Picture Gallery - Browse through your iPad's photo albums or scroll through your picasa / flickr albums.
- Youtube Support
- Formatting options - Edit and format your text through Blogsy's inbuilt menubar formatting options that could give word processors a run for their money. Blogsy's formatting bar is particularly impressive, with options for text editing, colors, highlighting, the works.
- Markup Editing - If you prefer to edit the HTML on your blog rather than the Rich Text, Blogsy isn't one to stop you.
The Interface
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| Blogsy has a beatiful interface that makes it the right mix of easy-to-use simplicity and amazing productivity. |
This is one area, where Blogsy Realy excels. It has a clean layout that's easy to get used to and yet displays all it's different features on the screen for quick access. On the right hand side, in a narrow column, it has icons for web browsing, photos, mail, Picasa, flickr, YouTube, etc which, on the whole, contribute towards a nice look for the app. Any user will immediately recognize each icon's specific function. A tap on the icon will reveal a sidebar-like extension suited for its specific function. For instance, tapping the browser icon results in a larger pop-out suited for browsing the web, in contrast to the narrow one revealed when skimming through photo albums.
The majority of the screen's real estate is dominated by a white typing space for your blog posts. Thank god for that. With an app like Blogsy, it's easy to forget what the app's originally intended for, above which are nice looking buttons which blend in with the app quite well. These buttons allow you to edit the attributes of your post, add a new post, change the publishing date of your post, etc. Tapping the title of the post allows you to edit that.
Above this mass of text is a neat clean formatting bar which can slide to the left / right to reveal more extensive formatting options.
Blogsy also has a set of two button at the bottom of the aforementioned right hand column which allow you to edit the markup of your post (through HTML tags) and Chang the settings of your blog or add new blogs to the app and edit other general settings.
Shortcomings
With an App like Blogsy, this is the one section where I post where I am, and always will be, dumbstruck. Few words of criticism come to my mind with such an app. And the shortcoming that I do find are more related to the iOS platform than to the app. But if I must succumb to looking for a drawback simply for the sake of it, I'd have to say that the photo uploading process is a tad too tedious.
Summary
Blogsy is an app that fills a unique and underdeveloped niche in the App Store. Although there may be fewer people (in quantitative terms) who would appreciate such an app, it is undeniable that this is the best app they will ever come across fr the purpose. In fact, some might even go so far as to say that blogging apps aren't going to get any better than this.
Rating
It is when I find an app like Blogsy, which makes it harder for me to find flaws in than to understand the app itself that I allow myself the pleasure of rating the app:
9/10.
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