One of my longest-running complaints about Squarespace has been their crummy iOS app experience. Until yesterday, the app we were stuck using was something that only kind of worked back in the Squarespace 5 days, and when Squarespace 6 was unveiled during the summer of 2012, the app somehow got even less useful (or more broken, depending on how you look at it).
Now, a year-and-a-half and several pointless apps later, Squarespace has finally released a new pair of iOS apps that are actually useful to me:
Squarespace Blog — Used for writing and publishing posts.
Squarespace Metrics — Used for checking site visits and the like. (iPhone-only for now.)
The Metrics app is okay I suppose, but the real meat here is the Blog app. Since I primarily work from my iPad, publishing articles and links on Unretrofied has been an exercise in frustration until now. Since their iOS app was so horrendous before, I had actually begun using the Squarespace back-end from Safari to publish everything.
If you haven't tried doing this from iOS before, let me tell you right now: it's a terrible experience.
For example, you could only copy text into the text editor's Markdown "block" — it was nearly impossible to write anything there manually, and none of the text could be edited once pasted. Any fixes necessary had to be made in another app, then I would have to delete the entire Markdown block from the post, create a new block from scratch, and paste the updated text into it. Yeesh.
And don't even get me started on trying to use the little features like the Categories list and post-scheduling. Let's just say those things are definitely not touch-friendly.
With the new Blog app though (which I'm using to write this very post), the processes of publishing/updating articles, creating link-posts, editing URL slugs, choosing categories, and scheduling posts are all quite easy. I can finally ditch the stupid website back-end and focus more on the writing itself.
Of course, there are still things I'd like to see added to the app, namely TextExpander support and a built-in web browser (for gathering links and whatnot). They may never add these kinds of things, but at least the app works well enough in its current state.
