Download the Free TypePad App for the iPhone

Did you hear that the iTunes App Store opened today?  Even better news for TypePad bloggers is that the free TypePad download for the iPhone is now available!

TypePad bloggers who own an iPhone have been able to use the i.typepad.com solution for months now, creating and editing posts, checking stats and managing comments from the Safari browser.  The launch of the TypePad download offers exciting new features and functionality.

With the free TypePad download for the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can:

• Photoblog in-the-moment and customize your photos by cropping and resizing
• Upload photos from your iPhone photo gallery to your TypePad blog
• Create and edit posts, even when you're not online
• Publish a post immediately or save it as a draft

The photo capabilities of the TypePad download offer powerful flexibility.  Snap a photo from where ever you are - a wedding, a baseball game, a conference - and post it to your blog with a few taps of your finger.  Or, perhaps you want to send some older images from your iPhone gallery to a photo album you have on TypePad.  The new TypePad download makes it easy to send photos from your iPhone to your blog.

To download the free TypePad app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, follow this link or head to the iTunes App Store and look for it in the “Social Networking” category.  You can also spot it right from the front page today!

The TypePad Mobile team has plans to add features to the TypePad download for the iPhone, and they would love your help.  Try it out, then tell us in the comments what features you would like to see.  We may be able to add your request to a future release.

Introducing Blog It for iPhone

We have even more good news for iPhone and iPod Touch users.  Back in April, we launched Blog It Powered by TypePad, a Facebook application that makes it easy to blog or micro-blog from within Facebook to let friends and colleagues around the web know what you're posting.

Now, the most popular blogging application on Facebook is available on your iPhone. Today we're releasing Blog It for iPhone, a free web application built specifically for iPhone's Safari browser that lets you post blog entries or status updates from wherever you are to more than a dozen different online services.

Since Blog It's launch, we've made some great improvements to it.  In May we added support for Markdown so you don't need to write HTML by hand; and in June we added support for FriendFeed and Jaiku, to bring the total list of services we support to thirteen. Blog It now supports creating content on Blogger, Facebook, FriendFeed, Jaiku, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad Vox, WordPress.com, and any WordPress.org site.

To try it out, open Safari on your iPhone, go to http://blogit.typepad.com/ and select "Add to Homescreen" to install the Blog It icon onto your mobile desktop. Click on the Blog It icon and start creating simple blog posts and/or updating your status message.

Blog It updates all the various sites and services you use via one easy-to-use interface:

• When you log in with Open ID, you only have to log in once; the system remembers your information until you log out.
• No need to enter your contacts twice: If you've used Blog It on Facebook before, Blog It will import all your other blog accounts.
• Twitter users have the option to update your Twitter status with blog post titles and a link to the post.
• It can take a long time to update four or five different accounts individually, especially on a slow connection. When you use Blog It, your phone connects just once, and we do the rest of the work for you.

Blog It for iPhone continues Six Apart's long tradition of providing mobile blogging applications that support over 90% of smartphone platforms, including Symbian Series 60, Windows Mobile, Palm, BlackBerry, iPhone and iPod Touch. Read more about TypePad's Mobile offering.

Blog It is free and available for anyone, so feel free to tell your friends and blog readers who don't yet have a TypePad account.  Head to http://blogit.typepad.com to get started!

Big TypePad News at the Apple WWDC

Big news for TypePad members came straight from Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference this morning. Our own Michael Sippey demonstrated the forthcoming native TypePad application for the iPhone during Jobs’ speech to over 5,000 attendees. The iPhone SDK (software developers’ kit), released in March of this year, has been downloaded over 250,000 times and used to create thousands of applications for the iPhone.  Jobs invited representatives from just a handful of these applications to demo what they’ve built for the iPhone, and the TypePad team felt extremely proud to be included!  CNET's News.com has some great coverage of the TypePad demo.

The forthcoming native TypePad application for the iPhone will be a free application that enables TypePad members to blog from the iPhone or iPod Touch within a fully optimized and beautifully designed native TypePad environment. You’ll be able to easily create a blog post from your iPhone and seamlessly publish to your TypePad blog, or jot down ideas from your phone and save them for later editing. Take photos from your phone and instantly incorporate them into a blog post, or search and post any of the images found in your iPhone gallery.  Like this photo of Michael, taken from the front row of the WWDC by our CEO Chris Alden:

This application continues Six Apart’s mission of bringing blogging mainstream by taking cutting-edge technology and making it accessible to everyone, just like the iPhone did last year. TypePad now supports more than 90% of the worldwide smartphone market, including Symbian S60, Palm, Windows Mobile, RIM, Blackberry and iPhone, making TypePad the undisputed leader in mobile blogging. 

Please note that the native TypePad application is not yet available – the free download will be available as soon as Apple opens up their application store in iTunes. We don’t know when the store will open, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know! You can sign up to receive an email notification as soon as the native TypePad application for iPhone is available.

Even though you'll have to wait a little while longer for the native app, TypePad members were still the first bloggers in the world to get a specialized iPhone interface with the release of i.typepad.com back in September.  If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can already take full advantage of the optimized blogging interface via your Safari browser at i.typepad.com.   

TypePad.com has more information about TypePad for iPhone.

Announcing A Native TypePad Application for BlackBerry®

TypePad’s Mobile offering keeps getting better: Today we’re launching a native application of TypePad for use on the BlackBerry® Curve™ and Pearl™.

You can now use those devices to compose, edit, draft and publish blog posts within the BlackBerry interface. This means you can write posts at any time, and from anywhere – whether you’re waiting for a train or plane, you have a few minutes before your next meeting starts, or if you want to be the first to upload notes and thoughts from a conference you’re attending. If you have a BlackBerry Curve or Pearl you can also take photos and quickly and easily upload them onto your TypePad blog. The camera integration lets you capture images and publish them on your blog in two clicks.

Download the TypePad BlackBerry application

With this announcement, Six Apart now supports 90% of the mobile market, including Symbian Series 60, Windows Mobile and Palm, as well as a web application for the Apple iPhone. We also expect that a native application for the iPhone will be available soon.

TypePad bloggers James Kendrick and Kevin C. Tofel will be running a cool contest on their site jkOnTheRun, which features the latest news and reviews of mobile technology hardware and software. Stop by their site for details on how you could win an unlocked BlackBerry device and a two-year Pro account for TypePad!

Visit the TypePad Mobile page to learn all about blogging from your phone.

Apple hits 100,000 iPhone SDK downloads; we're excited!

As you can probably imagine, we're very excited about the possibilities that the new iPhone Software Development Kit opens up for mobile application development.  Last week we announced that we'll be developing a native iPhone application, as a complement to our existing TypePad for iPhone web app. (If you're a TypePad user with an iPhone or iPod Touch, visit i.typepad.com to check it out.) Today there's plenty of coverage about Apple's SDK topping 100,000 downloads, and our very own Chris Alden is quoted in Apple's press release announcing that milestone:

"Six Apart pioneered the mobile blogging experience with an iPhone-optimized blog service," said Chris Alden, CEO, Six Apart. "We're taking it to the next level with our native iPhone application for TypePad that's already in development."

What's gratifying for everyone on the TypePad team is that our iPhone web app started as a "hackathon" project for Walt Dickinson, one of our rock star designers and front-end engineers at Six Apart. (Walt's a long time Mac user and Apple fan, so to see his work show up in an Apple press release was pretty cool.)

But what's a "hackathon" you ask? Every Wednesday we clear the calendars and encourage our engineers, designers and even marketers to hack on a project of their choice. And out of those Wednesdays we get great features like the iPhone web app for TypePad, and plugins for TypePad's sister product Movable Type like Mark Paschal's Action Streams Plugin and Ben Trott's new Fire Eagle Plugin (just announced today).

So we're excited about the iPhone, obviously.  But it's only part of the story of what we're doing at Six Apart. If you're interested in helping us invent the future of blogging -- and have the freedom to hack your projects on Wednesdays -- we're hiring, so get in touch!

Shiny new icon for the iPhone and iPod Touch

Have an iPhone or iPod Touch?  If you add the TypePad for iPhone web app as a webclip to your iPhone's home screen, you'll now get a bright icon that will look great alongside your other favorite iPhone apps and websites.

Adding it is easy.  After you've updated your iPhone to version 1.1.3, visit i.typepad.com in Safari and click on the "+" button in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.  Now you'll have a quick and easy way to sign in to TypePad from your iPhone, and a great-looking TypePad icon on your home screen!

Update:  And here's a tip on how you can add your own custom icon for your blog, in case any of your readers add your blog to their iPhone's home screen as a webclip.

1. Create your own custom 57x57 icon, and save it in PNG format.
2. Name that file "apple-touch-icon.png"
3. Upload it to the main folder of your account by signing into TypePad and visiting Control Panel > Files.

It's that easy! The next time someone saves your blog as a webclip on their iPhone, they'll get your pretty icon instead of an automatically generated screenshot.

Video Demo of TypePad for iPhone

Frank Gruber, the editor of Somewhat Frank, has created a beautiful video demo of the new iPhone-optimized TypePad interface.

It's excellent. :)

Introducing TypePad for iPhone and iPod touch

We've baked moblogging into TypePad from the very beginning. From integration with Nokia's LifeBlog to our free TypePad Mobile client for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phones, TypePad has been leading the field with excellent mobile blogging tools and services. So when we saw Apple's iPhone in January with its unique browser interface, we knew we'd have to do something special for TypePad.

Today, we're very excited to announce the availability of our new iPhone-optimized interface for TypePad. iPhone owners can try it out by visiting i.typepad.com. (If you have an iPhone but not a TypePad blog, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial.) You can create and edit posts, manage comments, configure mobile settings for posting photos directly from your iPhone, and view your published blog, all from the comfort of, well, wherever. :)

Using TypePad on the iPhone is the best blogging experience for mobile devices thanks to its tap-based interface and custom integration with built-in iPhone functionality. Blogs published through TypePad look great on the iPhone as well, thanks to our standards-based publishing engine and gorgeous designs.

Give it a try and we think you'll really enjoy blogging from your iPhone with TypePad.

Additional information and screenshots are available after the jump...

CNET’s Crave Craves TypePad Mobile

CNET’s Crave blog has a great review of the TypePad mobile app, with some good tips about how to get the most out of it. TypePad Mobile lets you post to your TypePad blog from your Symbian, Palm or Windows mobile phone.

Have a supported device, but don’t have TypePad mobile yet? Learn how to install and use the TypePad mobile app in this Knowledge Base article.

TypePad Mobile and the Treo 680

Here at TypePad HQ we're very excited about today's introduction of the Treo 680.  We've been working closely with Palm to make sure that TypePad Mobile works well with this new version of the popular smartphone, and we're thrilled that the (colorful!) 680 will soon be available from a mobile provider near you.  TypePad Mobile makes it easy for you to post photos and entries to your TypePad blogs and photo albums with just a few clicks. 

But TypePad Mobile isn't only available for the 680.  It also works with the popular Treo 650 and 700p, and versions of the application are also available for Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 devices.  You can learn more about the application here, and can download and install TypePad Mobile directly to your mobile device from get.typepad.com.

If you're hungry for news on Palm's announcements, two of the best Palm communities are right here on TypePad:  Treonauts and Palm Addict.  So be sure to visit them for the inside scoop on the 680!