How To Blog From a Mac: 10 Crucial Mac Blogging Apps
Blogging is a blast, and Macs are my favorite computers, but it’s a challenge finding good blogging software to get my daily post done from. A few apps are absolutely critical to my blogging, and I think the’d be helpful to you too, so I wanted to share them with you.
Also Read Our List of 34 Great Blogging Resources and Tools
- MarsEdit: MarsEdit isn’t cheap at $40 but it is hands-down the best mac blogging client available. It offers integration with nearlyever blogging CMS, including WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, and Tumblr
- Photobulk: Best two bucks I ever spent. Photobulk makes it really easy to make and position watermarks, resize photos, and do it all in bulk. It’s very well designed, and serves its’ purpose very well. And at $2, it’s cheap.
- Adobe Photoshop CS6: This is a bit out of reach for some bloggers, so a good free solution is GIMP, an open source software which is comparable. Photoshop is another vital app of mine, great for creating unique graphics, and things that will last. I also frequently design secondary elements of my site, and buttons using photoshop. It’s a valuable tool, and very versatile. Also good for book covers.
- iBooks Author: If you want to easily lay out a great looking ebook, this is the best option there is. iBooks Author is 100% free, and offers a variety of free templates, and page layouts that make laying out and organizing your ebook a breeze. You can even export straight to the iBooks Store, or to a PDF format. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer Epub exporting, but PDFs can be converted to Epubs for free using converters like this one.
- Evernote: I use an odd mix of Evernote and Apple Notes to keep track of all of my ideas on the go, and thanks to the cloud they all nicely sync straight to my computer. The additional forms of post that can be added to Evernote ultimately give it the lead, and for the price of free it’s excellent.
- Wunderlist: Are you a mess? I am. Wunderlist is my taskmaster, and that beautiful, functional list design on the mad app keeps my tasks managed, and my posts somehow make it out on deadline. Thank you Wunderlist.
- Grandview: For the “grand” price of free, Grand View offers a brilliant distraction free interface that goes beyond the concept of a white page. You see only one sentence at a time which shrinks to fit the page as you type more text. The whole concept is stop you from constantly looking forward and back at what you’ve written. It’s great for getting good ideas down on paper, but not so great for spelling, which naturally suffers because you don’t see the full text until the end. Fantastic if you’re willing to proofread.
- Skype: Microsoft’s Skype is fantastic for making connections, conducting interviews, and saving time communicating with important people that can grow your blog. Video chatting truly is the way of the future.
- Pages: Apple’s pages is another valuable resource for creating white papers, ebooks, et cetera. You can export to .Doc, PDF, and even .Epub (the universal Ebook format) meaning that you can create a document and have it ready to be sold on Amazon in minutes. Pages also has a wide variety of nice templates that help to make for a nice layout for any document. Charts and graphs are easy to make, look great, and screenshots of them work well in blog posts. Everything is manipulable by drag and drop. It’s excellent, and it’s only $20 which is a small price to pay.
- Google Drive: I rest really easily knowing that any post I write, or image I save is backed safely up in the cloud, and Google drive is really good at that. It’s also nice to be able to edit a document from anywhere and have it up-to-date and ready to publish wherever you end up.
- Bonus: Problogger Book. This was the first book I bought that got me into blogging, and it’s the most useful book I’ve ever owned. It’s so legendary that it’s sold incredibly well years after publication, despite a shifting industry. It’s a mustread blogger book.
Also Read Our List of 34 Great Blogging Resources and Tools
There are a lot of good apps out there for blogging and writing, and I’d love to find out some other good ones from you. What do you use in your blogging? How many of the above do you use?