I just finished @dougpete‘s blog response to my tweet regarding the @WordpressiOS app “update”.

I followed that post with a response to my colleague @mrjarbenne:

To which he responded:

I stand by what I said and I think I can see where @dougpete is coming from; but I don’t think our thought process is on the same wave length. I blog a lot, and I support about 12 blogs personally board wide in @HWDSB. @mrjarbenne, as head administrator of @HWDSBCommons supports even more than that. In today’s day and age blogging on an iPad should be a given, an everyday occurrence, not a novelty. It needs to be easy and I should be able to do everything in one place. This past year, I used the @Wordpress app exclusively to support such endeavours as the Bulldogs Literacy Game, The 2012 EcoFair, and the Director’s Student Voice Forums. I was able to live blog, which many supporters, each of these events to a @HWDSBCommons blog running a P2 theme. The joy of the P2 theme is that it auto updates, thus enabling a live news feed style set of posting. Some issues:

  • HTML layout only with no visual editor (somewhat fixed now)
  • No access to Media Library for posting of the same picture multiple times
  • No YouTube access – must double-tap + exit the app to visit YouTube, copy the URL, double-tap back, etc….Time consuming and silly in today’s day and age
  • Multiple image uploading at one time impossible – must do each individually
  • Jetpack completely non-functional on self-hosted – .com centric

That about rounds it up but, for the most part, this update “This is a big one!” as touted by @Wordpress  / @WordpressiOS (http://ios.wordpress.org/2012/08/09/version-3-1/) is little more than a superficial twist on a tired design. I find this particularly true as I support teachers and students who find the @Wordpress app problematic. My 7 year old picked up the @BlogsyApp in 20 minutes!

The @Wordpress update is nothing new. It sports a grey sidebar instead of white and caters almost totally to .com installs. This is my beef – it is geared to the .com ecosphere and offers little to nothing to those that self-host. Do a search of wordpress.com on the post (http://ios.wordpress.org/2012/08/09/version-3-1/) and you’ll find 12 instances of the term. There are so many updates that are dot com specific that it renders it virtually identical to what it was before.

The discovery of the @BlogsyApp for me was blogging personified. Drag-and-drop YouTube embedding! Come on @dougpete – you can’t compete with that! How about multiple image uploads and embedding – again with drag and drop capability. How about drag and drop URL linking? That’s there too. Media Library access? yup! Multi-user / multi-blog adds? Yup!

Plus, the people don’t lie. Do a search for @BlogsyApp – rated #1 all over the place. @Wordpress App? Not so much.

I guess if you only blog on the iPad periodically, and therefore aren’t looking for something better then perhaps you can suffice with @Wordpress. I can’t do it. I want better. I want the iPad to do what it was designed to do. No more – no less.

Oh, and dashboard access? I have that in Safari. I never needed an app to give me what I had already.