Stunning Content Optimizer InboundWriter Coming Soon To An iPad Near You [Exclusive]

By

inbound-writer-html5-ipad
Image courtesy of InboundWriter.

InboundWriter is one of those stunning, trick applications you’re surprised even exists. It’s a web-based text editor that allows you to see — via a big speedometer-like gauge — how well you’ve tuned your document to be search-engine friendly (otherwise known as search-engine optimization, or SEO), and then gives you the tools to tweak your document’s SEO to perfection. And yes, it’s free — so long as you don’t go over eight documents per month.

But since its launch early this year in May of last year, InboundWriter has been running on Flash, making it annoyingly unavailable on the iPad. But that’s about to change; it’s been re-worked from the ground up to run on HTML5, and has even had its aspect ratio optimized for the iPad.

“The people asking for it have gotten louder and louder,” Jay McCarthy, VP of Marketing at InboundWriter told us over the phone, talking about how users have been clamoring to use the service on their iPads.

McCarthy says he also kept seeing people using portable keyboards with their iPads, which helped in the push toward the iPad-friendliness of HTML5.

In fact, the decision to support the iPad almost meant that Internet Explorer 9 users wouldn’t be able to use the service.

“We were very, very close to making the decision to dump IE altogether, because of their lack of HTML5 support,” McCarthy says; they eventually relented and added support for IE9 with the help of some “really ugly hacks.”

What about an app? “We haven’t made that decision yet,” McCarthy says, adding that if they go that route, the result will likely be an HTML5 hybrid.

Anyway, don’t fire up the iPad yet — InboundWriter begins a closed beta today, so it isn’t quite ready yet; McCarthy says it should be available to everyone within a few weeks. If you want to try it out, it’s free — go ahead. Any more than eight articles per month costs $20/month, but that’ll also get rid of ads within the WordPress plugin (yes, there’s a WordPress plugin). A heavy-use, enterprise-level plan will launch this summer.

 

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.