This short post comes to you courtesy of the brand new WordPress app for iPhones and iPods Touch. It’s short because typing on my iPod gives me a headache but my first impression of the app is a positive one. Set up took under 30 seconds and I was ready to post. There are fields to fill on in for the title and text of a new post plus a place to add tags and a nifty multi-touch scrollable list of all your categories. Personally, it is hard to imagine writing much more than this on the tiny keyboard (and the app didn’t switch to landscape mode when I tried). But on in a pinch or on-the-go I give WordPress a solid B for this version 1.0.
UPDATE: Phew, back on my laptop and the typing is easy — well, as easy as it gets for old two fingers here. Here’s a link to WordPress’s description page of the new app. I couldn’t figure out how to add a link to a mobile post in the app or grab an image from the web, so I did both of those functions just now from the full, webby version of WordPress.
When working on or editing a post, there are just four buttons at the bottom of the screen: write, photos, preview and settings. Write brings up the keyboard. Photos takes you to an (in my first use) empty image library with the opportunity to add photos from the iPhone/iPod’s regular iPhoto-linked library or to take a new picture with the built-in camera. If you go to your regular library, you can choose any photo from any album. The preview button takes you to a view of the post on your blog in an embedded browser. And settings lets you edit the publication date and time or set a password for the post. Pretty simple but entirely useful, as long as you keep it short.
I think we’re going to need to have some link functionality added, however, as that’s a core function for blogging, obviously.
UPDATE2: Zdnet blogger Michael Miller makes the obvious and most excellent point that the real failing with the app is Apple‘s failure to include cut and paste support or allow external blue tooth keyboards.
Leave a Reply