Evan Sims

Automattic releases WordPress for iPhone

Guess where I am right now? OK, nowhere exciting, really; but I could blogging from anywhere now, because tonight Automattic- the company responsible for the WordPress blogging platform myself and most of the blogging community uses- has released WordPress for iPhone. It’s free to download from the App Store right now.

WordPress for iPhone isn’t the first method we’ve had for working with our blogs on the mobile device; there are a least a half dozen plugins for creating a more hospitable environment for managing your content on the iPhone, but quite honestly the quality of the ones I’d tried left a lot to be desired.

This app is polished, official and completely native, so you aren’t forced to work on your content from within Safari. Thus far everything I’ve played with has worked flawlessly, and the app is super responsive and smooth, even on very large posts like my previous Gotham Knight review. The app works for iPod Touch and iPhone users alike, but the latter gets several additional bells and whistles, like taking pictures with your phone’s camera and embedding them into new or existing blog entries from the same, integrated UI.

I love this app, and I think a lot if you will too. I believe we’ll be seeing a lot more mobile blogging coming thanks to this, and TypePad’s offering. One feature suggestion foe the next version? Use GPS and include the data as a custom meta variable. We could do all sorts of fun stuff with our archives and Google maps if we had that data inserted automatically for us.

Edit: Here’s an intro video from the website for those who aren’t familiar with the app.

Screenshots

Gotham Knight

After catching The Dark Knight earlier today and loving it, I decided to pick up Gotham Knight and give it a try too. One can never get enough Batman, right? Gotham Knight is a direct-to-DVD anthology of six short, animated stories that take place in between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, with each film being written by different writers and produced by different animation studios. What makes Gotham Knight so interesting is that each studio, and indeed writer, was given free reign to explore entirely different aspects of Bruce Wayne, Batman and indeed Gotham City itself. Each story is very different from the previous in terms of subject and visual style, but perhaps more interestingly each story reveals something different about Batman himself.

The first film, Have I Got a Story For You, was produced by Japanese Studio 6°C. Largely unknown in the states, Studio 6°C’s only recognizable work to us would be the 2008 Transformers animated television series, though I have not had an opportunity to experience it yet. “Have I Got a Story For You” tells a tale of a ongoing struggle between Batman and an unknown villain in reverse (Memento-style) from the perspective of four kids. Each witnesses a different aspect of the battle, and in turn has a completely different interpretation of Batman to tell their friends. One sees him as a monster able to shift in and out of the shadows, another saw him as a huge bat rather than a man, and yet another saw him as a robot (which was very cool, I might add.) The final kid experiences the last version of batman, the traditional capped crusader we all know, and helps him finish the struggle with the bandit.

I thought the animation style was pretty interesting, though it didn’t do much for me personally. Very gritty, and rough, and the character designs were shaped in a distractingly odd form. Still, it’s a fun story, and a neat adventure into the minds of Gotham’s citizens and how differently each see’s Batman.

Continue Reading ‘Gotham Knight’ …

The Dark Knight

Finally had a chance to watch Dark Knight this evening after having to endure days of chatter on Twitter about it. “Oh man, it was so awesome!” I’d hear. “Best movie EVER!” one person declared. I died inside with each tweet, little by little.

So today I decided to get my butt over to the theater and check it out myself, and I must agree with the Twittersphere; this movie rocked. The action scenes were top notch, there was some wicked new gadgets introduced (city-wide sonar for bat vision? so cool.) and the acting, as predicted, was just fantastic, if not a bit creepy given Ledger’s untimely death.

I think my only minor gripe with the film was it’s lack of Bruce Wayne screen time. Christian Bale has long been one of my favorite actors, so I was expecting to see more lines from him than there were. Bale ends up spending most of the film in the costume, which is great, but you really fail to experience his acting ability when he gets so few lines behind the mask. I thought Wayne was far more interesting in the first film in that regard.

Ledger, as I think everyone expected, proved himself to be an outstanding Joker. He really nailed the role, and delivered a fantastic, creepy experience. It’s a true pity we won’t have an opportunity to see him reprise the role.

Two-Face was pretty interesting, though I found Eckhart’s villainous side at the end to be the low point of the film. To me, it came off feeling a bit rushed. Two-Face was always a fascinating character to me in the Batman universe, and given the long back story he and Batman had in the traditional lineage I was surprised to see the rebooted movie’s different look at the once-friend-now-adversaries. Personally? I would have liked to have seen them introduce Two-Face in this film, perhaps show his criminal side’s origins at the finale, and then allow for part of the next film to close things up. As it is I wasn’t very satisfied with Two-Face or his brief involvement in the story.

In any event, my complaints are very minor, and I can find little fault with any aspect of the film. Definitely a worthy sequel to Batman Begins, and in many ways I think it even raised the bar a notch.

I give it a 4.5/5 —
Almost perfect, but I think they could have spent a little more time developing Two Face and Wayne’s relationship.

So, what did you think?

Watch Dr. Horrible. Immediately.

Joss Whedon, well known creator of popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, recently began sharing episodes of a new web series he created staring Neil Patrick Harris, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. Simply put, it chronicles mad scientist and wannabe super-villain Dr. Horrible, aka Billy, as he attempts to put a stop to his nemesis Captain Hammer (played by Nathan Fillion) and join the ranks of the evil league of evil. Ever seen Venture Brothers? Imagine a live action version of The Monarch singing and you’ve pretty much got the idea. The series also stars Felicia Day as Penny (Dr. Horrible’s love interest, who’s fallen for Captain Hammer), and Simon Helberg as “Moist” who plays Dr. Horrible’s friend in evil.

Whedon and co penned the script during the WGA strike; they wanted to put something together fun that could be produced inexpensively, but still look professional. Episodes starting streaming from their website this month, and the Internet has been chattering about it ever since.

Myself? I watched it. I loved it. I totally recommend checking it out. If you haven’t yet, check it out before midnight tonight; the series will no longer be free to view on their website, and will move to digital distribution via iTunes (and elsewhere, presumably) after that. Even so, it’s totally worth the $4 on iTunes; it’s a fantastic little series.

Watch: Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3.

Everything is so shiny and new

Friends and visitors to my site may have noticed a rather dramatic change this afternoon; I decided to bite the bullet and push my redesign, even though I still have a few things left to tweak and polish. Yeah, I’m really taking a note from MobileMe’s launch on this one.

In any event, there’s nothing revolutionary about this upgrade- it’s really just an evolution of the previous design. My goal from the beginning on this was to clean things up, improve readability and have a more useful sidebar. For readability, I increased the maximum content width, increased the whitespace (particularly in the navigation) and softened the background image. For the sidebar, I’ve added Lijit back for blog search, a Disqus panel for browsing popular threads and seeing who’s active, obviously kept my FriendFeed widget, and slapped together a Brightkite location widget which I’ll be releasing shortly.

As I said, I pushed this out a little early, so I’m sure there will be bugs. If you notice any issues, please feel free to let me know in this entry’s thread. Thanks!