Blog Touch Pro

I’ve written previously about iOS apps for WordPress blogging. There are quite a few apps, none of them perfect. One of my favorites, a rather simple one called TinyDesk, doesn’t seem to work anymore, so I took another look at apps and ran across Blog Touch Pro, available for both mobile and tablet.

Feature wise, the app is pretty straight forward to use. It works with both hosted and WordPress.com accounts. You can set up as many as you like. Blog Touch Pro has a full set of formatting tools, making it easy to get the look you want in your copy. Post options like tags, categories, publish status, slug and even excerpt can be accessed from a pop up menu.

One of the featues I like best is that the app makes it easy to filter posts by draft or completed status. I tend to write a lot of drafts with images that I go back and turn into stories later. Those drafts often get buried by new posts in apps like the official WordPress one.

Blog Touch Pro isn’t free, but they do have a free trial so you can see for yourself if the paid version would work for you. Generally speaking, I really like the app. It has a clean interface, it does about everything you need to create or edit posts, and it seems pretty stable as you use it. I do have complaints about Blog Touch though. Switching between blogs is not very reliable. It frequently requires the user to re-authenticate in order to pull the the right posts for the right blog. My other complaint is that it doesn’t work with the iOS spell checker, which is almost a deal breaker if you end up doing a lot of composing in the app. The app also seems to have a problem recognizing paragraph breaks because of the way it uses div tags. It will inconsistently format a post so some breaks are recognized and others are not. Lastly, it doesn’t pull down your blog’s categories, which is also kind of a pain.

Blog Touch Pro is a nice addition to the available list of WordPress apps. It has flaws, one quite serious, but is otherwise a very useful tool in a blogger’s arsenal depending on how you want to use it. The flaws also prevent Blog Touch Pro from being a primary or only tool for mobile blogging.

Update: The more I’ve used the app, the more I like it and the more it drives me nuts. With use it becomes more crash prone. Also, some non-standard UX elements make aspects of using the app very unintuitive. I think the bottom line is Blog Touch has a lot going for it, but ultimately the flaws outweigh the benefits.

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