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

Twitter: when all else fails, blame your users.

You’ve probably seen it all over your feed reader today; blogs screaming “Twitter just called Scoble out!”, or “Twitter is punishing their most popular users!”, and frankly they’re right. Alex probably thought he was doing the right thing and taking a proactive approach by explaining things in his blog post yesterday, but he made some poor choices that Twitter is going to have to face this weekend- namely, stating that a factor of the huge downtime issues Twitter has been having is users like Scoble who have tens of thousands of followers are causing database calls in the system to pile up.

As Scoble so eloquently put it in a Seesmic video response to the blog post today, bullshit.

Now, to be clear; Alex didn’t call Scoble out explicitly. It was inferred by the fact that, well, Scoble is pretty much king of Twitter in terms of followers. It was him and a handful of other users (who, it should be pointed out, would also qualify as these evil-doers to the system) made Twitter by singing it’s praises.

More to the point, the blog post is bullshit because it doesn’t explain why Twitter has been having constant issues since day one, long before Scoble and others amassed their base of thousands of followers. Even more so, it doesn’t explain how Twitter is going to fix these issues. So the database is backing up… how are you going to resolve this? Throw more servers at it? Get rid of your ridiculous XMPP-based message backend? Rewrite the site in a language that is actually scalable? For a post entitled questions and answers, there were far too few answers and way too much finger pointing. Let’s be clear what Twitter is: it’s a shit ton of text flying around, and a bunch of databases to store it in. This isn’t that complicated.

Alex isn’t a bad guy, or an idiot. I don’t think his intention was to make it seem as though Twitter is calling these people out. However, Alex isn’t a PR guy. He’s a developer. And, speaking from my own perspective as a developer, we shouldn’t be put in charge of trying to explain things to customers, users or the press. We aren’t good at sugar coating things, or explaining problems to users in a way that makes it consumable. We’re quick to blame the users because, well frankly, it’s usually user error that’s the problem. But users don’t want to hear that- they just want to know when it’ll be fixed.

Continue Reading ‘Twitter: when all else fails, blame your users.’ …

Howdy.

Decided to bite the bullet and get the ol’ blog up and running again. Bare with me over the next couple days while I get WordPress and a new site design up and running.