Blogging on the iPad is a sorry state of affairs — I’m also coming at this from the angle of a prose blog, not a photo blog. Both WordPress and BlogPress allow you to do the same basic features: type in your thoughts and press publish. Neither of the apps let you define links or format your text — you’re limited to plain style. Some of this, I am led to believe from researching other apps with the same problem (Evernote), is how restrictive Apple is on its rich text features. On the other hand, all of the Office-style apps out there let you format text, so I don’t know what’s up. What I do know is, neither of these two apps even come close to the feature set most bloggers need.

WordPress (Free)

As the official app for WordPress, it’s a sad commentary when the best I can say is, “Some of the time, it doesn’t crash. And it’s free.” A quick five minute double-check of some features yielded four crashes. It crashed inserting a picture. It crashed while canceling edits. I wouldn’t be surprised if it crashed while crashing. When I was able to successfully insert a picture, it didn’t show up in the local draft; I had to go out to the local view to see it, and even then it was just code, not a visual. You can, however, manage comments, pages, and assign categories within the WordPress App.

I was also impressed with its offline features. It cached previous posts which made it handy to reference what I’d  said about a topic.

BlogPress ($2.99)

In addition to the hearty, “It crashes less” feature, BlogPress also connects to Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, Movable Type, TypePad, Live Journal, Drupal and Joomla in addition to WordPress. If you’re not using WordPress, BlogPress is the only game in town for you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t connect to Tumblr. I had a lot more success with this app, even within my WordPress-hosted sites. For starters, the only time it crashed on me was when I connected it to Live Journal, and when I relaunched it everything was OK. Inserted pictures showed up inline where I wanted them to, and I could adjust their alignment, but not their size. I was also unable to manage comments or edit static Pages in BlogPress. Still, I found BlogPress to be worth the $2.99.

My recommendation for BlogPress is somewhat grudging. It’s not a bad app, but I’m hard pressed to find many blog posts I’ve ever written that I could do entirely in either of these apps. Almost every post has bolded or italic text, an image, and a link or two. Of those three things, both apps only let me embed the image. Unless I’m writing a rare text-only post, I’ll need the web front-end of each site to wrap up the post. Sure, the apps are good for throwing a post together on the iPad and tossing it in the online Drafts folder for later editing, but it’s pretty sad I can’t rely on either of them to start-to-finish an average blog post.

Hopefully, at some point we’ll see a better selection, as well as the ability to format text and insert links. Until then, BlogPress earns my enthusiastic “At least it sucks less than the WordPress app” seal of approval.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

I first used Fluid, the site-specific browser creation tool for Mac OS X, a long time ago. But I didn’t find it compelling enough to integrate it into my daily life, in part because virtually all of my digital life still lived on the desktop. As I personally moved more and more to the cloud, it became key.

I tend to use Fluid apps for things that I want to have open and at the ready all day. These are things I consider to be more like apps than websites, so having a separate window makes sense, if for no other reason than I can easily command-tab among applications by selecting the appropriate high-resolution logo. With Safari, Chrome and Firefox, I’m in and out of a lot of websites throughout the work day, but most are content sites, or web applications that I use once per week or less. Here are a few of the key ways I’m using Fluid today.

Google Calendar

I long ago tired of problems with invitations in iCal. There were just too many frustrating examples of invitations not coming through properly or at all, and I invested the maximum amount of time I was willing to solve it. Last year, I also tired of Mail.app’s performance when dealing with many accounts and large numbers of messages. I was using Google Apps for several accounts with IMAP enabled, and using Mail.app as my client. Since they were all Google accounts anyway, I made the decision to switch to Mailplane, which performs flawlessly and had the added benefit of saving a lot of precious space on my MacBook Air’s hard drive.

Then I started noticing how good email invitations looked in the Gmail interface, and how easy it was to add them to the Google Calendar associated with that account. It just worked. But I also have several calendars. So I decided to make one Google Calendar account my main or master account, and shared all my other accounts with it, with full read and write permissions. Then I created a Fluid app for that Google Calendar account. I now have one Fluid app called gCal that holds my various calendars in one view, and I turned on Google Mobile Sync for them all, so I immediately get changes on my iPhone and vice versa.

Pandora

Pandora has become my music source of choice while working. I’ve got several stations queued up, including Wilco, Spoon, Ben Harper, and Res, among others. I haven’t really tracked it, but I don’t think I come close to Pandora’s maximum of 40 hours of listening per month. If I exceed that, I’ll need to look into a paid Pandora One account, which has its own player download. In the meantime, I’m quite content to load Pandora in a Fluid app, start it up, and hide the window from view until I need to click the button that says I’m still listening. Again, having it in a separate window that I can hide from view while still using Safari is a huge win for me.

Facebook

There’s not much I need to say about Facebook, which has taken the world by storm. But I am now syncing my contacts with Facebook via their iPhone app, which I love because it’s the easiest and best way to have friend’s pictures show when they call. I once suffered from Facebook Fatigue, but I’ve gotten past that and now use it as an essential communications tool for certain contacts. I’m just starting to use it for some serious social marketing for my projects, and having it open in its own window makes it easier to keep abreast of messages and other updates.

WordPress

Finally, TheAppleBlog is hosted on WordPress, so I created a Fluid app specifically for creating posts like these. I’m also finding it more and more useful to tap out ideas that pop into my head and create rough outlines while the ideas are fresh, and save them as drafts. Then, when I have dedicated time later in the day or week, I can spend more time working on the posts.

Are you using Fluid in your daily Mac experience? If so, how do you use it? If not, why?

It’s Halloween and so my top pick for this week is Alive 4-ever, a top-down zombie shooter with plenty of guts and gore to go around. I’ve also been checking out TowerMadness Zero, NASA and WordPress 2.

Alive 4-ever ($1.79)

As it’s Halloween, I thought that at least one of my top picks this week should be themed for the occasion. Despite the clumsy sounding name, Alive 4-Ever is a surprisingly polished top-down shooter. The plot is simple and disgustingly cliché: for whatever reason, a zombie apocalypse happens, you take to the streets to rescue other survivors.

The game takes its inspiration from some of the best zombie titles out there, including Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead. There’s a battalion’s worth of weaponry on offer, including zombie-slaying classics like the AK-47. Plus, if you’re after more firepower you’re able to purchase bigger, stronger, faster guns in the shop after each level.

There’s also a Bluetooth multiplayer mode, allowing you to jump into the action with three other friends. Alongside guns, zombies and survivors, the game throws in experience points too. Completing a stage earns experience points, these precious points go towards upgrading your character. In effect, you’re able to become the ultimate undead-destroying warrior.

TowerMadness Zero (Free)

Earlier this month, our own Alfredo Padilla took a look at 49 different tower defense games for the iPhone. Owing to the epic nature of his list, days later Alfredo distilled the document down into five tower defense games worth owning. All of Alfredo’s picks costs a few bucks though and, in this cash-strapped climate, some of us don’t have much money to burn on iPhone games.

That’s where TowerMadness steps in. The game is available in two monetary flavors. You can purchase it for a couple of bucks, or you can download the Zero edition: a totally unrestricted ad-supported version of the game for free. The ads are unintrusive and targeted in such a way that, for the most part, they feel relevant.

Of course the iPhone doesn’t need another tower defense game. Aside from being free, TowerMadness is a pretty good representation of the best qualities of the genre. All the usual TD staples are there — waves of enemies, upgradable towers, strategic play — but it’s all wrapped up in excellent graphics too.

NASA (Free)

National organizations seem to be slowly switching on to the iPhone. Last year, the BBC decided to create an iPhone-specific version of its excellent iPlayer site. Canada’s National Film Board just released a wonderful app for viewing its content on the go. And now NASA has released its very own app, allowing us earthlings to keep up-to-date with space mission news.

The app is essentially like having a tiny mission-control in the palm of your hand. There’s a listing of all NASA Missions, all of which have awesome names like Mars Express and Mars Odyssey. Tapping through to a mission section provides a mission briefing, photos, videos and an ever-so-slightly ominous countdown timer.

For me, the best part of the app is the video section. Rather than attempt to visualize the various space happenings described in the app, the videos bring these extraordinary happens closer to home. You can observe spacecraft launches, see astronauts float around in zero gravity, listen to people in space describe their experiences, and watch history in the making.

WordPress 2 (Free)

The original WordPress app just wasn’t so hot. With a clunky and convoluted interface that was all function and no form, it immediately felt dated. And, for writers and bloggers alike, it certainly wasn’t the most inspiring environment in which to attempt to pen a post.

The user interface has been updated but still, on first look, the app looks worryingly basic. In fact, it’s disconcertingly similar to its clunky counterpart, WordPress 1. I appreciate that the WordPress app is here to serve a function, but, discounting features, surely it could have been executed with a little more pizazz?

Anyway, looks are not the most important thing with WordPress 2. This version introduces several new features to the mix. There’s automatic saving and restoring of posts. A new comments interface which includes author URL and Gravatars. The app even stores password in the keychain. If you’ve got your own WordPress blog, this is certainly an app worth checking out.

That’s all the picks for this week. I’ll be back in seven days with a fresh selection of App Store recommendations.

In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?

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WordPress launched an iPhone app for posting blog entries right from your device. With my Mac out of commission yet-again, I thought a good test would be a TAB post using only the client.

I used my 1st gen iPhone and the EDGE network to grab the app from the mobile version of the app store. It downloaded and installed very quickly and I was set to go in less than 3 minutes. The app enabled you to setup multiple WP blogs and only needs your site URL and credentials. It then sucks down all your customized settings for posts (quickly, even over EDGE) and lets you start blogging right away. The “Write” screen makes quick work of title, keyword and category entries (very well done interface) and you have the option of saving to local drafts or posting to your site.

Typing a full blog post on the iPhone is no small feat (esp. if you have large fingers) and I was disappointed that there was no option to rotate the display to take advantage of the larger width keyboard.

It does let you embed photos/pictures from your iPhone library (and lets you take one right from the app) – we’ll see how the Seattle library photo looks that I just took and attached.

The app also lets you preview posts in your site template and gives you the option to password protect it.

The WordPress folks obviously spent a great deal of time and energy working on the interface and functionality. While the iPhone autocorrect can make some typing annoying, my overall first impressions are very good. It did crash once on me, but most developers are quick to blame OS 2.0 for bugs.

If you give the app a try, let TAB readers know how it worked for your configuration by dropping a note in the comments.

This whole post was created solely on the iPhone except for the WordPress logo and interface screenshot.

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