Many months ago an online friend of mine (Swift) requested my help in enriching his website with more content. After some initial rejection, I eventually took up the offer & began writing some tutorials but my interest died fast due to 2 main reasons:
- As a poor soul serving my 2 years NS liability I do not want to burn my precious weekends writing content for the public.
- I’m just a procastinator who fails at life.
But—this little application gave me a little hope. With WordPress for iPhone, I could write some blog posts on my iPodTouch during my free time in bunk & with the application’s website announcing the application will be moving towards iPhone OS 3.0, I figured it will be a good time to review this application & hope future versions of it contains what I wished for. As an application built for a mobile device, it spots an uncluttered interface with a design aimed at people making short posts in my opinion. I will focus on mainly 2 functions of writing a blog post, entering text & adding pictures.
Writing a post
Entering the page to make a post, I noticed there isn’t a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor. Depending on which sides you take, you may applaud or cry at this decision. Not including a WYSIWYG editor gives you more visual space to look at your content while keeping your post clean & neat (you know what I mean…fonts abusers). However having to type HTML codes to make items such as list or links is quite tiring too. So I suggest either the use of a logical markup language or a very minimal WYSIWYG editor that contains only features that relates to logical markup (lists, links) & which can be easily hided to reveal more screen space.
Adding Pictures
For the photos obbessed blogger, adding photos in your post couldn’t be easier by just snapping photos with your iPhone & adding them on the go. However for the iPodTouch user, getting photos to post would be quite a hassle. You would be better off posting with a computer (except for screenshots of an app from your iPodTouch). Â All images added are appended to the end of the post. This inflexibility is not something I like although I understand not many people write such a long post on a tiny mobile device.
Conclusion
At its current state (Version 1.3), the application is still in a very simple state with some bugs which make the experience a half enjoyable one. More can be done about freeing up more visual space to write content. I will be looking forward to new features future versions were to offer. Â I would also like to see some features added to help in the construction of simple long posts. Final Rating 2.7/5 (assumptions the bugs I encountered are fixed) with a prediction that a near future version could rise to a score of 3.4 in some months time.
This post is typed with my iPodTouch, sorry for the lack of screenshots for my first review :S.
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