Wordpress App for iPhone finally arrives

Today I was pleased to discover the Wordpress App on the App Store. With six apart having a Typepad App available from App Store launch day Wordpress users had been feeling a little left out. This was especially frustrating as using Wordpress from the iPhone Safari browser was near impossible with unedutable forms and crashes.

Summary
Liked:
+ Easy to use
+ includes all important fields (even tags & categories)
+ Saves a draft of your work if you get interrupted by a phone call
+ all work done locally so don’t have to worry about losing signal/connection when writing
+ Can insert photos from camera or photo library
+ has a preview mode that even downloads you wp theme where possible
+ Accepts HTML tags

Didn’t like:
- Crashes if you switch connection type in the middle of submission (e.g. Switch from GPRS to 3G or wifi to edge)
- no control over image placement
- HTML is hard to write on iPhone and no shortcuts are provided in the app. Would liked to have seen buttons for open/closing common tags like strong tags
- impossible to demonstrate code as even & amp and & gt gets converted to & and > when you save.
EDIT:- images get resized to 300px wide regardless of whether image was larger/smaller before

More
Setting up was easy enough. Just provide the URL of your blog and login details. The App doesn’t seem to handle http or www prefix so make sure you start with the domain/subdomain. Seems to support both wordpress.com and self hosted wordpress blogs. You can add multiple blogs and switch between them in the main menu. I don’t think you can post a single entry to multiple blogs though.

Once you enter your chosen blog you see your last 10 posts which can be editted or deleted. You can if course create a new post. The interface is simple to use with fields for title tags and you main text. You can also choose which category to post in and add new categories. Be warned view categories or adding new ones requires Internet access and if you witch from 3G to edge/wifi or vica versa while connecting the app locks up. It appears to be continually trying to submit/retrieve data but never finishes. This is more of an iPhone bug than a problem with the App. A timeout fail would be good though so you can save your work and try again.

The app doesn’t try and be too flash with graphics or effects. This is good as stability of the app is very important as a lock up or drop out can loose your hard work. Apart from when connecting to the blog and having the crash I described above the app has been stable. So although I still recommend saving often you should have problems with losing your work. Just don’t submit you post until you have a solid connection and are not moving.

At first I thought the app only supported plain text posts. However, after hitting done the virtual keyboard is replaced by a new menu which give the options of Write, Pictures, Preview and settings. Pictures allows you to insert images from you camera or photo library. Seeing as you can save images from the web into your photo library and this really gives you a lot of freedom to add imagery to your posts. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to control image place lment though. All images get inserted at the end of your post.

The Preview mode is very useful it downloads your current Wordpress theme from your site and renders your new post in context. Unfortunately it didn’t manage to retrieve my theme and so a simple preview was used. This was still helpful as I was then able to test if the HTML I used would render correctly or show up in the post. The HTML I tested worked fine. Unfortunately, the app is a little too enthusiastic with rendering HTML as even code you want to display is converted. For example & amp becomes & if you put the symbol with text, even if you do not finish with a semi-colon.

The settings option let’s you modify the time stamp and password protect entries, so even less commonly used settings are available.

Actually posting your blog when finished isn’t immediately obvious. There is no SUBMIT/make it go button. Just a status you can change from local draft to Published. It also allows you set status to online draft so you can finish off at a Desktop computer before making it live. For the purpose of testing I am posting this direct from my iPhone.

Overall a great App that every Wordpress blogger with an iPhone should have. A few minor quirks than hopefully can get worked out by future updates. Most importantly it is stable and works. This App recieves a FFE gold award.