Review of the new iPhone WordPress Application

I found the WordPress iPhone Application to be very klunky. I gave it a review of 3 out of 5 stars in the iPhone app store.

1. There’s a list of blogs you choose from when it starts, which is lame because I only have one blog. Why do I have to hit an extra item? Start up time is critical for useability. Don’t get in the way of me getting my post written.
2. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to actually post to my blog. Turns out you have to set the “Status” to “Published” and then hit the “Save” button. This is really lame. I ended going back and forth from the drafts list and getting a bit irritated. There should be a big “Post Now!!!1!” button.
3. I can’t set the size of my pictures. I hate this. This is, in fact, a deal buster for me. The new version of Ecto does something cool – it allows you to see a cssTag for your pictures. I’d love to see this application do something similar. Or at least have a setting where I can set the maximum size for my pictures.
4. I kept getting lost when choosing a picture to add to the post. There’s some really weird back and forth behavior here. This needs to be streamlined and is particularly awkward.
5. The application needs to show some inline indication of where the added photos will end up. I couldn’t tell how my post was going to be laid out. There’s a “Preview” button, but this is also lame because there’s some boilerplate text at the end of the preview saying how the pictures will be appended to the post. Um, isn’t this a preview? How does this help me? My advice? Lose the preview, and make the editing more WYSIWYG. Previews, imo, are workarounds for lame design.
6. There should be default categories and tags, etc. Make it so I just start the app, enter a title, enter the text, maybe add a picture and hit the post button. Budda-Boom, done. Over and out. It’s too complicated right now to write a post – too much navigating around doing crap I don’t want to do.

I think this application was designed like a desktop application instead of an iphone application. I think it needs some work. That said, it did actually work. Which is a good thing, and for something like this, a great starting point.


There are more pictures of the application, here.