Searching for Tools

The stationary store (papelería) below my flat (departamento) has moved, so I don't have Internet. I'm going to need to call the cable company to get it installed, another large expense. Meanwhile, there is an Internet cafe down the street that is open late. I was there until almost midnight last night, struggling with, first, the Posterous blogging app and site, and then Blogsy (a blogging app) and Blogger. Blogsy is pretty cool, but a little complicated. It features drag and drop for fotos and can interface with many different online services.

 

Maybe Blogsy will work with Tumblr. I finally got sick of the Tumblr app, which is designed for the iPhone and is a pain to use on the iPad. It's not just the crudeness of an app rescaled to work on a larger screen, it's that phone sized apps just don't work as well on the bigger screen. It's a design problem, but not so much in the aesthetic sense (although scaled graphics do look kind of ugly), but in functionality. For example, the software keyboard is very limited for the smaller screen of a phone. It's probably functional and useful for thumb typing, but regular touch typing really sucks. Another example is that it doesn't have a landscape orientation.

 

Anyway, the Tumblr app sucks on the iPad. Just take my word for it.

 

The problem I had with the Posterous app was that while it does (sort of) work offline, it does this badly. I wrote a post offline that I was going to post later. When I was finished, I received repeated messages that the app was unable to connect. I wasn't even sure if it had saved the post. When I did finally get online, it got stuck trying to post for 20 minutes. There was a progress bar that showed "31%". That's when I started looking for another app. When I came back to the Posterous app, it had finally posted, but the headline was screwed up. (I'm not even sure if this was my error or the app's error.) The app wouldn't let me correct this. I would have to create an entirely new post and cut and paste from the old post. On top of this, I couldn't copy the text of the older post! Oh, and it's an iPhone app with the same limitations re: screen orientation and shitty keyboard. So, screw the Posterous app.