iPhone Apps: Hands on with WordPress 2.1
A lot of work has gone into this blogging client and it’s eminently more useable than before. Still, is WordPress 2.1 for iPhone a practical tool for blogging on the go or should you keep lugging your MacBook around, always at the ready? The answer is a little bit of both.
WordPress.org recently began shipping version 2 of their iPhone blogging client and it’s been well received. Over the weekend, WordPress 2.1 for iPhone came out, bringing new features and some bug fixes.
What’s new in WordPress 2.1
• A post or page can be deleted by swiping across its title in the Posts and Pages list
• Commenter email addresses are now visible
• The app now supports HTTP authentication for password-protected self-hosted blogs
• Fix for link helper not working in mid-sentence
• Fix for lost content after changing status of post a “more” tag
• Fix for visual glitch with buttons in Comments section
• Fix for problem recognizing valid URLs during set up
Much like Facebook for iPhone, WordPress has most of the marquis features of the web client. You can find, edit and post blog entries using this app, even adding graphics and images.
Further, you can quickly and easily manage user comments, as well as create new pages.
Powerful enough to be useful…
Although if might be my big ol’ fingers getting in the way, WordPress for iPhone makes an excellent adjunct to the browser based version I use on my Macs — it’s really quite good. However, because of the small screen size and the shear number of steps it takes, for example, to find, edit and place an image inside a blog posting, I don’t recommend using it as your primary blogging.
Actually, it’s not the number of steps, it’s how cumbersome and slow it is to execute all of those moves — think headache inducing — on an iPod touch or iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen, which is perhaps only ideal for extreme bloggers like hikers and bikers.
Where WordPress for iPhone excels is microblogging, such as taking informal snaps of junior in the big game or school play, and posting a single pic along with a blurb describing the action. Then again, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube already have these bases covered.
…too limited to go it alone regularly
So, again, this brings us back to using WordPress on your Apple handheld as a blog management tool — yes, it’s super easy to move between multiple sites — processing comments and even setting up posts (i.e. gathering the text and image, creating a draft) for later editing on a larger screen.
That said, Apple’s long-rumored Mac tablet (a.k.a. iPod touch on steroids, iSlate) and its 10 inch screen, plus a Bluetooth keyboard, would be an ideal mobile blogging device.
For now, we’ve got a pretty darn good helper…
What’s your take?
Related posts:
December 13th, 2009
A Apple tablet will be great for WordPress.