Blogging Using Only the iPad Mini

Tablets have become the de facto post-PC era devices that took the technology world by storm ever since the first iPad was introduced by Apple. Since then we've seen a lot of new tablets hit the market, including Android devices along with the latest Surface Pro from Microsoft. Still, the iPad is to this day the most popular single tablet device out there, and since the iPad Mini has been released, it has become a very portable way to stay connected. One interesting question however is whether the iPad Mini can really become your go-to computing device for all of your blogging needs.

As a blogger, there are several things that you may require from your computing platform, and on the surface it may be dubious whether the iPad Mini really answers those needs. First, you need to be highly mobile, since many bloggers like to cover news, community and press events, things that require you to go outside and drive somewhere. Another very important criteria is allowing you to write your blog posts easily. Finally it needs to provide all the secondary functions such as image cropping, resizing, uploading, the ability to handle video, make Skype calls to contacts, and everything else a blogger typically does.

Where the iPad Mini shine is obvious: It's a small, highly portable device, which provides you with a big enough screen to do real work, something that can be painful to do on a phone. By adding a Bluetooth keyboard, you can easily type a whole blog post, and it is powerful enough to keep up with anything you require. With its LTE connection, it has the same connectivity and benefits as a phone, and the larger screen and wireless keyboard makes it into a small laptop. When it comes to apps, iOS usually wins with the most apps out there. You can Skype, many different image editors, and so on. Plus, there are even apps that are made especially for bloggers. Blogsy for example is a popular iPad app that provides a very nice interface for almost any blogging platform out there including WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and so on.

Instant Apple iBooks How-To

Do you love to read ebooks on the iPad? Are you a writer who wants to publish his or her own interactive ebooks for the iPad, and sell them on the iBookstore? Zeeshan Chawdhary, a highly experienced web and mobile developer who is currently the CTO of iCityConcierge Ltd, a travel startup, shows you how to do both in his new book Instant Apple iBooks How-to. To read ebooks, you use the app iBooks in your iPad. To write and publish ebooks, you use the app iBooks Author in your Apple MacBook or iMac. The first five sections describe how to use iBooks, and the rest tell you how to use iBooks Author 2.0, the latest version of the program as of this writing. You should also know how to create an HTML5 webpage.

For readers: how to use iBooks

In these sections, you are introduced to features that enable you to browse and purchase ebooks (or download free ebooks), group these ebooks into different categories; or Collections, and add PDFs to the iBooks library. You also learn about tools that you can use while you read these books. These reading tools enable you to select text from the book to be copied, pasted, and emailed. In iBooks 3.0.2, which was current when he wrote this book, you can also change the color of the highlight when the text is selected, and use the Fonts and Themes feature to change the font size and family of the text, and the color of the book's background. If you're using iBooks 3.1, please note that this version no longer has these last two features. The horizontal bar that appears when you select the text has also changed. When you tap the text to select it, only the words "Copy" and "Search" appear in the bar. If you tap one word, the word "Define" - which enables a box with a dictionary definition of this word to appear - will also show up in the bar. To view iBooks - and the rest of your iPad - in "night mode," go to your Settings app, press Accessibility, then switch Invert Colors to On.

For writers: how to use iBooks Author

Here, Instant Apple iBooks How-to teaches you how to create an interactive London travel guidebook by choosing a template (you can find templates in the program itself, or various websites), and editing the text and graphics. In iBooks Author 2.0, you can now directly drag images from websites onto placeholder images. Then you learn how to create a custom HTML5 Twitter widget that pulls tweets about London into the ebook, and a widget where a 3D object can be viewed and rotated in the ebook. When inserting a 3D object into your iBooks Author 2.0 document, make sure "Auto-rotate object when idle" is unchecked; otherwise the 3D object will not show.