Perhaps one of the best, if not “the” best, blogging apps on the iPad has been updated with a slew of new features. Blogsy is an iPad app that makes blogging on the go as easy as tapping and dragging, of course you’ll still have to write them.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Fomola’s (the developer of Blogsy) CEO Lance Barton a last week regarding some questions I had for a magazine article I’m writing (more on that later), Barton told me all of these great new features coming to the app and believe me, it was hard to bite my lip. But now that Barton and crew have let the cat out of the bag, we can finally discuss some of these great new features coming to update version of Blogsy, 3.4 aka Dragon (it has been submitted to Apple today, but takes about a week to be approved). If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll be happy to know that you can now access your full WordPress Image Gallery. The team has also found a way to allow users to use “featured image support.” Since their is no WordPress API for this feature, users will have to change some PHP code on their end, for which the team has written detailed “How-To” instructions. They’ve also added custom field support, sticky support, post format support and a bunch of other great WordPress features.

Fomola has also added a new blogging and video platform, Tumblr and Vimeo respectively. Aside from a whole list of added features, the team (based out of South Korea) have also fixed a ton of bugs, as well. Oh, did I forget to mention, the new update will also add Retina support for the new iPad? One thing to keep in mind, the app and all its icons and images will be updated, but if you pull images from the web or access the web through the app, images may not “appear” Retina quality, simply because they aren’t. But fear not, your posts will look absolutely normal on computers and other devices (darn Retina display and its to many pixels!!).

We’ll have more on Blogsy soon, as I said, it’s part of an article I’m writing for a magazine, but that’s all I can say for now. If you haven’t checked out the app, but love to blog, trust me, at only $4.99, it’s a steal and it’s the last blogging app you’ll ever need to buy.

Below is a list of all the updated and new features:

We are really excited announce our latest update. We added a new platform, a new service and a whole lot of new features. It takes Apple about a week to approve updates so you should be able to find it on the App Store next week.

So what is in Dragon?

Features

1. Retina Display Support – Blogsy now has the high resolution graphics to look clear and crisp on the New iPad.

2. Tumblr support – Blogsy supports all post types for Tumblr. So if you want to post a quote post, audio post, video post, text post,…etc, you can do it with Blogsy. Check out our platforms page to see all the Tumblr features Blogsy supports.

3. Vimeo support – This means you can now easily drag and drop your Vimeo videos into your post. No need to copy and paste embed codes.

4. Featured Image Support – Now you can set or edit the featured image for your self-hosted WordPress blog. You will be able to choose an image from your iPad to use as a featured image or choose an image from your WordPress Media Library. This is not part of the WordPress API so you need to change some files on your server in order to use this feature. If you want to do it now so you are prepared for when Blogsy will be on the App Store the instructions are here.

5. Custom Field Support – Set and edit custom fields for WordPress blog posts.

6. WordPress Media Library Access – If you have a WordPress.com blog or a self-hosted WordPress blog which is running version 3.1 or later then you will have direct access to your media library.

7. PDF / Document / Audio WordPress Drag and Drop – You can drag and drop PDF, document or audio files from the WordPress media library into your post.

7. Post Format Support – Set and edit the post format for WordPress blog posts.

8. Sticky Support – Choose to make a WordPress blog post “Sticky” .

9. Keep Local Draft – We have added an option to keep a local draft when publishing a post to your blog.

10. Local Draft UI Change – Now even if you have a post open it will appear in the “local” draft list. There is a check mark next to the post in the list showing which post you currently have open.

11. Edit Button – Added an edit button at the top of the “local” draft lists to make it more clear how to delete a draft if a user is unaware of the swipe to delete UI.

12. IBM Connections Encoding – IBM Connections uses non-standard HTML entities for foreign languages. iOS can not read these special HTML entities. So we have built a parser for these so IBM Connections users can load and edit posts from their blog written in a foreign language.

13. TypePad Source Image – Blogsy now dynamically changes the source image used for displaying your image in a blog post based on the display size you choose. This makes your blog load faster without any loss in image clarity.

14. Blogger Parser Enhancement – Blogsy’s Blogger Parser will now convert between the standard <p> tag and the Blogger <br> tag method. This means you can edit a post in your Blogger Dashboard created with Blogsy now and Blogger will not change the formatting. This also means that if you load a post created or edited in your Blogger admin into Blogsy you can now drag images between paragraphs.

15. Blogger Media Library – Many people are unaware that Google owns both Blogger and Picasa so they choose to use Picasa as a Blogger blog’s media library. Therefore Blogsy now prompts people to set up their Picasa account right after they set up their Blogger blog.

16. Default Video Format – The default video format is now set to iFrame. (Only for new users.)

17. Flickr Private Images – Users are now able to see their Flickr images set to private when they do a Flickr search.

18. Language Support – Thanks to our great translators Blogsy is now in Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Czech and Korean.

19. Flickr Image Sizes – Flickr added two new sizes to their list of automatically generated image sizes. We have added these new sizes in Blogsy.

Bug Fixes

1. IBM Connection Publishing Issue – Blogsy would crash after the post was published.

2. IBM Connections Set Up Problem – Blogsy would add extra community blogs when setting up an IBM Connections account.

3. Page delete – Blogsy would crash if you tried to delete a page from the online page list.

2. Account editing – Blogsy would crash if you tapped on “Save” two times in a row in the WordPress account editing menu.

3.  Renamed xmlrpc.php problem – If a users had a renamed xmlrpc file but their blog was not sending back the correct xmlrpc URL then Blogsy would not set up their account.

4. Blogger Page Issue – If a user had started a Page in Blogsy then saved it as a local draft, when they opened it again it would be changed to a post instead of remembering that it was a page.

5. WordPress Space Issue – If you opened a WordPress post which had lists in it then the space between list items would increase.

6. Block Quote Formatting – If you tried to eliminate  bolding or italicizing of the block quote the bold or italic would come back.

7. Placeholder text – Was missing in the tag and category selecting views for some platforms.

8. Flickr Link URL – If a user’s Flickr ID and username were different then the image link URL would be incorrect.

9. Bookmark Managing – If you deleted the last bookmark Blogsy would crash.

10. Dock Managing – You could drag a dock item below the “Add” item in the list when managing the dock items.

11. Picasa Username – Blogsy would show the number Picasa was sending back as the username instead of the displayed username.

12. Side Switching Button – The button in the dock used to switch between the Rich Side and HTML Side would disappear sometimes.

13. Flickr API Change – Flickr changed their API so this caused Blogsy to pull in images at 240 pixels wide instead of 500 pixels.

14. YouTube and <div> Tag Setting – If you had set your paragraph mode to <div> and dragged in a YouTube video and used the old video embed code then all blog content would get erased and replaced by the term “Undefined”.

15. Google Authorization – Google changed their authorization URL which caused a constant processing message in Blogsy when setting up a Google service.

16. Picasa API Change – Picasa changed their system so the default URL now sends you to the 512 pixel size of your image. We now fetch the original image size and add the appropriate code to the URL so the image links to the full size image.

17. Other minor bug fixes.

Source: Fomola