Blogging on the go

Half Dome, Yosemite National Park

Usually I don't spend much time blogging - or writing in general - at home. Whether it's due to an abundance of distractions at home, or something psychological, I'm not sure, but regardless the reality of the situation is that I do nearly all of my writing and planning when I am out.

So here's the question: will having the capability to blog on the go result in me actually doing so?

My needs for blogging on the go

A summer festival at Yasukuni Shrine. No wi-fi here!

I have a US 3G iPad in Tokyo. I know of only two cafés in this benighted city that actually provide free wi-fi. So I need to be able to produce an entry without the Internet. Ideally, when I arrive at home and am enfolded in the warm embrace of teh intarwebz, I can practically just hit the publish button and be done with it.

Obviously, this will not always be feasible if I want to use media from the Internet or don't have my research duckies all lined up in a row, and that's ok. I can probably somehow manage to bring myself to do that last 5% at home. Sometimes.

Typing on the iPad

It's quite good. But there are a couple of features that would be really nice.

• A quick undo, similar to on a computer, that scratches the last batch of letters I typed. Backspacing is too slow relative to the amount of mistakes I make on this keyboard. While it can backspace a word at a time, it takes too long for that to kick in.
• A way to delete (as opposed to backspace). I need to replace the first letter of a word often enough that this would save a lot of pain trying to move the cursor to the precise position, or just selecting the word and typing it over again.

Fundamentally, I don't mind making lots of mistakes. But I have to be able to fix them quickly and easily, else it becomes a huge drag on typing speed. There might even be ways to do these things that I haven't figured out yet. I would have mentioned paragraph selection, for example, except I just figured out how to do it right now.

Blogsy

Blogsy is the app I've typed this up in. I haven't seen any other blogging apps for the iPad, excluding the various site-specific apps or doing it directly from their web interfaces. Currently I use blogger, and I don't think there's an app for that. Being able to pull media from your accounts or the Internet at large is brilliant. Switching between display and markup is smooth like butter. There are a few ragged edges, but I have high hopes that they'll be polished. I'm quite satisfied with it so far.

My one wish for the app is related to my lack of an Internet connection:

I want to be able to drag and drop photos and movies from Photos and Videos local to my iPad into the post. I don't know if the public APIs for the photo and video services would permit 3rd party apps to integrate uploading, but if it's technically possible, this app would go from being useful to being essential, in my eyes.

My verdict so far:

I've typed and formatted this post. I'd like to add a picture or two, so we'll see what happens when I get home. It took longer than I had expected, but I attribute some of that to the process of familiarizing myself with the app. Overall, I've got a good feeling about this.

The result after posting it to Blogger is not quite WYSIWYG, but... close. About 10 minutes of tweaking and adding captions (something Blogsy doesn't seem to be able to do yet).

Update: I had a look at the blog on the developer's website, and it seems like they're updating it to add local uploads shortly. I'm excited.