As promised here is my review of the iPhones wordpress app. This was an app much anticipated after Six Apart’s Typepad announced they will be doing an app for the iPhone. It is a simple content publishing end for your wordpress blog. The app is free and quick to download at only 359.5KB.
When you first launch the app you will be presented with a screen asking you to add your blogs account information such as url, wordpress username and password. Then you are lead to a screen where you can add another blog or just go on an enter the blog you just entered. Here you are able to see some of your most recent posts to that blog and any local drafts you have stored on that account.
In the bottom left you have a refresh button to get the newest post from the server. In the right hand side you have the create new post button Which asks for a title, tags, categories, status and your post. You have a lot of control but you still can’t set things like comments (on/off), trackbacks and the url. The post area is a basic HTML editor which is not that easy to use unless all you are writing is a simple text post because of screen size, this is not helped when you rotate the iPhone, the app stays vertical.
At the bottom of the screen you have Write, Photos, Preview and setting. Photos allows you access any photo’s on the device. It would be nice to see some flickr integration and previous photos on your blog but we may see these in later versions. Inserting photo’s is a horrible experience you select the photo’s from gallery in your iPhone and it added it to the bottom of the post, after it is published. There are not options for size or placement (left, right, top of post) they all appear after the post at the bottom. When writing a post the preview section loads a preview like wordpress would, but if the post has already been published you get a HTML preview as well as the wordpress preview after. This is very confusing. Then in setting you can set the publish date and password but more could be added there.
Overall this is a very good start, but there is room for improvement, and don’t forget that as soon as they give out a new release you will have to go through the first steps again as apple give developers nowhere to store saved data. Here is a gallery of all my images so you can see what I am talking about.
Added. Nice work on this one.