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    Category Archives: iPhone

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    A quick review of SmugShot for the iPhone

    I’m a big fan of SmugMug and was excited by the SmugShot iPhone application for taking pictures and uploading them to my smugmug account.

    I’m sorry to say that SmugShot is a disappointment. I frankly found it to be unusable and a pain in my keester - though it does have a few redeeming qualities. Okay, one redeeming quality and that’s its ability to upload photos to SmugMug from your Camera Roll. This part of the application works fantastically.

    Now the bad news. SmugShot’s user interface is a mess. The application is astoundingly slow and it’s way too modal (e.g. you have to do one thing at a time). Just doing normal things like starting up, saving pictures to the Camera Roll, and switching between its many modes is cheesegrater on the eyeball slow. Scrape. Ow. Scrape. Ow. Crap it’s still “Saving Photo”. Scrape. Ow. It really shouldn’t be any slower than the built in Camera application. For fek’s sake, it just can’t get in the way of taking pictures! It just can’t. Mike stomps foot and pouts.

    SmugShot really needs a rewrite to iron out the Grand Teton sized wrinkles. I can’t wait until they do but until then use the built in Camera app to take your pictures, and then upload your pictures to SmugMug using SmugShot. That’s actually a decently unsucktacular experience.

    Here’s how it should work (in my pretentious opinion):

    Scenario 1, setup:

    1. Run it.
    2. Click “Settings” button (note that the shutter button is already showing).
    3. Enter your SmugMug settings.

    Scenario 2, picture taking.

    1. Run it.
    2. Enjoy the super quick startup equivalent to built in Camera App.
    3. Click shutter button like Camera App.
    4. Go to 3 until done shooting.
    5. Click a button on the bottom that takes you to a list of photos you just shot (and they should also be saved in a camera roll).
    6. Batch select the ones you want to keep, or better yet, unselect the ones you DON’T want.
    7. Click upload.
    8. Wait until photos are uploaded.
    9. Go play Big Foot Bingo iPhone game.

    342355132_BiT8K-M.jpg

    Another problem with the iPhone Wordpress Application

    During setup it posts and then deletes a test post. This is really really really REALLY lametastically lame. For me any post to my blog notifies in order, feedburner, twitter, the White House, the NSA, Homeland Security, and Roger the one arm middle school street crossing guard near my house. That’s literally mega quad bazillions of people.

    Did I mention how lame this is?

    All you evil doers, knock off all that evil!

    The-tick2.jpg

    Yes, WordPress for iPhone, I’m talking to you.

    C’mer…. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you. Just come here for a second…

    Slap.

    You can go now.

    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.

    write-1.png

    There are more pictures of the application, here.

    Wordpress iPhone application

    Yay, WordPress for iPhone. This is my top ask for my iPhone. I hope it rocks! The video looks like it’s gonna be frickin’ off the hook, boooy. Okay, maybe it’s not THAT cool. But I’m excited.

    Sanjo



    How to set the reply-to header on your iPhone

    I struggled with this for a while and almost switched all my email over to another service. Luckily I figured this out before then. Whew. I had assumed it was impossible but then I noticed you can sync your iPhone with email accounts in iTunes. What isn’t obvious is that this syncs the email account settings, not the email itself. There’s a head slapper for you. So the reply-to address is supported - there’s just no way to set it on the phone. Probably what will happen is that I’ll get this all cobbled together and then the iPhone will get updated so I can do it on the phone instead. Oh well, that’s the price you pay for early adoption. Oh, that and $600.00 plus tax.

    Do this:

    • Create your account in Apple mail (I assume this will work with Outlook or Outlook Express on Windows but I didn’t try it).
    • Set your reply-to return address for the account you want to use.
    • Make sure all the settings are working for this account in Mail because it’s a pain to edit and test stuff like your smtp settings on the phone.
    • Set the iPhone to sync to this account in iTunes.
    • Sync
    • Eat brave Sir Robin’s minstrels.

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