by Steven Sande
Dec 22nd 2010 at 3:00PM
Anyone who is familiar with the Squarespace hosted blog service knows how great it is. Themes are professionally designed and give bloggers an opportunity to tweak them for unique sites with beautiful typography, and the service keeps providing more and more capabilities to subscribers. Squarespace service starts at anywhere from US$13 to $40 per month, with discounts for pre-paying for multiple years.
The latest gift from the company is Squarespace for iPad (free), which arrived yesterday and was touted in the Official Squarespace Blog. Like most of the other Squarespace products and services, the user interface design is top notch and the editor looks fantastic.
With some of the other blog editors available for iPad and iPhone, bloggers often need to depart from the editor in order to perform an action. The Squarespace app designers have used the wide open spaces of the iPad screen to let bloggers tag, categorize and create excerpts without leaving the editor, and a quick tap on a post or comment now displays a tray underneath the post containing action options.
The Squarespace web editor is one of the better blog editors I've ever used, and a lot of that editor is included in the iPad app. There are four editing modes -- Text, Markdown, Textile and RAW HTML -- and you can change text styles, insert photos and links and set excerpts in any of those modes. Undo and redo buttons are always within sight if you happen to delete or change your blog work inadvertently.
A short video highlighting the major features of the Squarespace app in action follows on the next page, with some cheerful mariachi music that will make your day.