The iPad as a blogging tool: not ready

For the last couple of months, I’ve been experimenting with my iPad as a potential blogging tool, and have come to the conclusion that it’s just not up to the challenge, yet. There’s two principal reasons for this:

1. The apps are rubbish

As this piece on the Apple blog accurately highlights, the paltry few blogging apps on the iPad are, well, rubbish. There’s a little hope with the suggestion that MarsEdit might come to the iPad, but until then, this is a non-starter.

2. Mobile Safari can’t cut it

Here’s the other problem – the main text editors built into the major blogging platforms just don’t work very well on the iPad. Here’s an explanation from the TinyMCE site:

There is a lot of questions regarding TinyMCE and why it doesn’t work on the modern mobile browsers. We have made tests on iPhone as well as the latest version of Android (2.2 Froyo) and they do not have proper support for editing. Android 2.2 Froyo does claim that they have support for contentEditable, but our test find it completly useless. You do not get a keyboard when focusing the area, there are no cursor so you can not se where you type and there are various focus issues as well as showstopping problems with selections. Same goes for iPhone, altho they do not claim to have support we have made some tests and it does seem to have some parts of contentEditable in there, however its to buggy to use.

The net result of this is that you can’t upload photos using the web interface of the blog platforms, and you can’t use the rich text editors, either, leaving you hand-coding your post 2004-style. Like an animal.

Things That Do Work

• I find that using Posterous to post-via-e-mail is probably the most efficient way of blogging from the iPad right now.
• Also, Typepad’s Blog It function works very nicely, too, and I use that for some of my blogs on that Platform.