“Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” comes to mind when using this app, although in a negative sense.
To begin with I thought it was great, all the features I would really need in a nice simple package. This was on a fresh WordPress install, so I thought if anything was every going to go wrong, then it was least likely to happen here as there were no plugins to get in the way.
First Impressions
As I have said above, to begin with I had high hopes for this App, it seemed well polished like the usual WordPress admin panel. Adding my blog was easy; simply enter URL, username, and password. It is after this part when confusioon occurs.
Opening up the App you get a nice, simple interface with 2 options: “Set up your blog” and About, clicking on setup you enter blog details and how many recent posts you wish to display, if you’ve managed that part correctly it will be taken back to the main screen where your blog is now listed. So far so good.
Clicking on the blog brings up an interface similar to Mail.app, listing all of your previous post’s and a Local Drafts folder, which you can use for offline drafts. Clicking on a post let’s you edit it, upload Photo’s, Preview it and change Post Settings. Although for me the Preview page has often frozen, sometimes just quitting the app and returning back to the home screen, and other times showing the post under a default template as if it cannot connect to the internet.
Posting a new entry is pretty similar, press the “Write” button and enter all the text. Under one condition, it doesn’t crash and send you back to the home page. Once you get to the interface it is pretty much self-explanatory, letting you enter a Title, Tags, Categories, the entry itself and set it’s status. There are also the same additional tabs as the edit interface. Once you’ve done here click Save to then, well, save the post. Assuming this works and you aren’t thrown back into the Home Screen you’re all done.
Annoyances
Where do I start. Firstly I have found that the Categories are cached, sounds great, but I couldn’t get the cache to update. Since first setting up I had created lot’s of categories through the web panel, and no matter what I did I couldn’t get these to show up. Also there’s it’s love of the Home Screen, can’t go anywhere/do anything without it. And finally no way to edit settings once they have been entered (as far as I can tell). It seems like once a blog has been added, it can’t be deleted, and neither can any settings which go along with it.
So really I like the concept of it, although think it’s pretty badly implemented. For now it’s deleted from my iPod, and I’ll definately consider installing again in the future.