It's been done fifty-five thousand times already, but I can't resist putting my own two cents into the discussion on blogging with the iPhone. Most of the coverage so far deals with Wordpress blogging. I've come to realize that as a Movable Type user I am apparently in a shrinking minority. I've been using MT since before Wordpress was even a thought, and I've chosen to stay with it because it's what I learned on, and I know it and its templating language like the back of my hand (which, admittedly, I don't know all that well since I can't really see it, but... oh, shut up). I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn a whole new system and go through the hassle of converting everything, so until some disaster occurs that leaves me having to start all over again, I won't be switching platforms.
So, consider this a review of the tools available specifically for Movable Type users on the iPhone. Unfortunately, there aren't many, and the ones that do exist are rather inadequate, at least for my needs.
The first tool I came across was iMT. This is a Movable Type plugin which provides an iPhone-friendly interface when accessing one's MT installation via Mobile Safari (the web browser on the iPhone and iPod Touch). The interface is very slick and works well for the functionality included, but the problem is that functionality is very limited. iMT lets you write new posts and either post immediately or save a draft, manage existing posts including publishing your previously unpublished drafts, and manage comments. But it does not give you access to any of your other MT plugins. This is problematic for me, as there are two plugins I use every time I publish a new post: MT-Twitter to post a link to the new entry on Twitter, and Hot Date to set the post date and time to the publish time, instead of the time the entry was started, as is the default in MT. Now, if iMT were to allow me to save a draft, and then switch to the full MT interface in order to access the plugins when publishing the post, this would work great. But alas, the iMT plugin has no option to show the full interface like most iPhone-friendly web sites do. The only way to get back to the full MT interface is to login from a computer and disable the plugin. I can't exactly do that when I'm sitting on the bleachers at the dog park. So needless to say, this plugin has been disabled on my system until Six Apart decides to make some improvements.
After my experiment with iMT failed, Six Apart announced Blog It, a web application for the iPhone which works not only with Movable Type and TypePad blogs, but several other platforms as well. It can also simultaneously post to Twitter, eliminating the need for the MT-Twitter plugin. It sounded promising, but when I tried it out I found that it was even more limited than iMT. It will allow you to write new posts for immediate publishing, but that's it. No drafts, no access to manage existing entries or comments. Even though this option eliminates the need to access those extra plugins, I still want to preview the post and set an excerpt (the short snippet from the post that gets sent with the e-mail notification) before publishing, which means I still need to save a draft and then access it in the full MT interface. So although Blog It might work for quick, short posts in which the default first couple of sentences will suffice for an excerpt and I don't have any HTML to check for stupid errors, I have yet to find an opportunity to use it.
When the iPhone 2.0 firmware and third-party applications were announced, Six Apart promised a free, native TypePad application (link opens in iTunes). Probably since Movable Type and TypePad are both Six Apart products, I mistakenly assumed that this application would work with MT blogs as well. I thought, at last, something that might actually work. Imagine my disappointment when I realized this application was only for TypePad blogs. I don't understand why Six Apart is neglecting its Movable Type customers this way.
So for writing posts, thus far the iPhone is pretty useless. The best I can do is write a draft ahead of time on the PC, and then log in later from the iPhone to publish it. And the only reason to do that is if I know I'm going to be away from my computer for several days but still want to publish something every day.
There is something the iPhone is good for, though, in terms of blogging. I can use the excellent iPhone-friendly version of Google Reader to read all of my favorite blogs and find new things to write about. If I see something I want to blog about, I e-mail it to myself with a special tag that causes it to be filtered into a "Blog Ideas" folder, and the next time I'm at the PC I can refer to this folder to get some new posts started. This is a frequent activity of mine when sitting on those dog park bleachers I mentioned before.
My wish list for blogging on the iPhone:
- For iMT:
- Integrated Twitter updating when publishing an entry.
- An excerpt field on the entry creation/editing screen.
- A full entry preview like the full MT4 interface provides.
- Links to switch back and forth between the simplified iMT interface and the full MT interface.
- For a native MT app:
- Upload photos from the camera roll to MT's asset system.
- Record audio posts and post them with a Flash control for playback.
- Save drafts to the server for later editing and publishing from a PC.
- For Google Reader iPhone:
- Sort items by oldest first.
- Tagging. (You have sharing, sharing with notes, and e-mail... why no tagging?)
- For iPhone itself:
- Copy and paste capability. I found the iCopy bookmarklet for Mobile Safari, which works okay for copying URLs and short pieces of text between web pages, but something integrated into the OS which works between different applications would be so much better.
- Lift the 640x480 limit and allow applications to upload full 1600x1200 photos from the camera roll.
A lot of people have asked for external keyboard support on their wish lists. Maybe it's one of the blessings of having a disability which stunts the growth of one's hands and fingers, but I am perfectly happy with the iPhone's on-screen keyboard. With the help of the automatic typo correction, I can type on it nearly as fast as I can on a computer keyboard. Granted it can be a bit laggy at times, but I haven't experienced that since installing the 2.0.1 update, and hopefully that means it's been fixed for good.
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