Review: Wordpress [iPhone App]

Review: WordPress [iPhone App]

Jul 23

WordPress finally puts out its native app for the iPhone. While at first the promising UI aspects look exciting, the application turns out to be a bit of disappointment. It’s definitely a 1.0-application. A short review. [rating:2.5]

A bit late in the game, WordPress finally decided to come out with its application for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The promise is that you’ll be able to blog from anywhere in an easy and robust fashion. I’ve spent some time with this application and ended up with a mixed experience. Robust, yes. Easy, not quite.

Version: 1.0
Price: Free

User Interface

WordPress for iPhone is a true iPhone application and follows all design and usuability conventions to the letter. Its slick yet simple UI fits right into the rest of the Apple iPhone experience.

Setup

The app’s homescreen provides a simple interface to add blogs. Aside from the regular parameters, you can also define how many previous posts should show up on the device. After that’s done, the application goes ahead and grabs your posts (30 by default). It doesn’t hold your entries locally, though. Once you lose your connection, it’s impossible to edit an article, unless you’ve composed it on the device.

Editing

After clicking on a story you wish to edit, you’re directed to a screen containing all the basics on your post: title, tags, categories, status and the actual body. Tags are entered by hand, separated by commas, while categories are entered via a dedicated screen, allowing you to choose from your predefined categories or create a new one.

All praise so far, but editing the body of your entry may prove to be dramatically less intuitive than the rest of the app. You’re forced to edit posts in bare HTML form, unlike the web interface WordPress provides for authoring your blog. Not that I’m shy of editing in HTML, but as everyone knows, typing on a virtual keyboard is all but easy, let alone punching in code…

This is a serious turn-off [to me]. I understand there’s no real need for a full-fledged WYSIWYG-editor, but I’m sure everyone would have appreciated some basic formatting like bold and italic. I’d also appreciate an easy way to create hyperlinks.

Photo support

That [rather major] defect aside, the app supports photos. They can either reside in your library or some straight from your built-in camera. Quaintly, the “Take photo with camera”-option is available on the iPod Touch, while, of course, the iPod Touch doesn’t come equipped with a camera. This was undoubtedly a 1.0-glitch and will be taken out with the next release. Pictures aren’t included inline, though, but rather at the end of a post.

The WordPress 1.0 app has obviously been rushed out the door to meet up to the competition and therefore is lacking some of the crucial functionalities one expects from a blog-editing application. At this point, it’s pretty impractical to edit all but short blurbs of text on the iPhone.

[rating:2.5]

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