The iOS Apps in my Workflow
When I'm blogging from my iPad 2 or iPhone 5 there are 4 apps that I use in my workflow: WordPress, Poster, iaWriter, and Static. The WordPress app used to be my blanket app, meaning it did everything for me. I wrote in it, managed comments in it, edited posts and pages in it, etc. Now the WordPress app is simply what I use to manage comments. This feature is frankly the only reason I still have it on both my iDevices. The writing screen is way to involved and feels very cramped, especially on the iPhone. So I went looking for a better solution.
Enter iaWriter and Poster. I love these two apps. When I'm just getting my thoughts out of my head on onto the 'paper' I use iaWriter. It's incredibly minimalistic and clean. It's beautiful. It reserves an incredible amount of screen space for your writing, using only a slim bar at the top of the screen to give you some basic options. It really is dedicated to writing and nothing else. The focus mode is super cool too. It keeps the focus on the three most recent lines of your text, everything else is grayed out. So you really can just focus on creating content.
When I'm moving from rough draft to published content I use Poster. I can import directly from Dropbox or from the clipboard. So with a simple copy and paste I can move my rough draft out of iaWriter and into Poster to edit and then publish. Poster is clean, super easy, and again basic. Your options here are posts or pages, that's it. Like iaWriter the composition area makes incredible use of the iPad and iPhone screens. I'm liking Poster more every time I use it.
Last but not least is an app that I just got recently, Static. It's purpose is to track your stats on various platforms. Right now it supports Twitter, Google Analytics, Dribbble, GitHub, and Instagram. It's incredibly clean and minimalistic. You can track the number of views and visitors to your blog for both the current and previous day. You can track the number of followers you have on Twitter along with the number of people you are following and the number of Tweets you've created. I don't use Dribbble, Instagram, or GitHub so I can't comment on those. All in all, Static is super easy, convenient, and useful for quick on the fly checks of your stats.
I also use the Apple Bluetooth keyboard whenever I'm using my iPad or iPhone to create content. I know there are a bunch of options out there but this keyboard works great for me and is super portable and reliable.
Of course this is all what I use when I'm not on my lovely, lovely Dell laptop, which is quickly making it's way out of my workflow for pretty much everything blog related. One day I'll have a MacBook Air....one day.
One final thought on using multiple apps in my workflow instead of just the WordPress app. I'd rather use multiple apps that rock at one or two very specific things than one app that doesn't do any single thing great. The time it takes me to move from one app to another, literally seconds, is of no concern to me because of how much time I gain by using apps that excel at their particular purpose. Plus it's way more enjoyable to use products that are made well, look great, and function just as you'd expect them to.