bytes 0f life .v2

This post is coming at you from postbot. The app i am looking at now is wptpgo. This mobile interface for wordpress has quite a few of the missing features i observed in postbot. If I focus on usability, then postbot wins even with the missing features.

Saving drafts is probably the biggest annoyance with wptogo. Each time you update a draft you have to provide a unique name for it. With postbot, you can continue to update the same draft many times. For posting on-the-go, i think this is fairly important.

I suppose that one might be inclined to pass this off as a feature. After all, saving multiple versions of a draft allows a pseudo revision history. If you end up not liking your third draft, you can easily go back to a previously saved version. However, you can do this fairly easy with postbot by changing the post title and then saving the draft again.

Even if you decide to salvage the annoyance of multiple draft versions, it all comes apart during the cleanup phase. Wptogo only allows you the option of deleting ALL saved drafts. This is no good and pretty much negates the possible positive.

The ui for wptogo is extremely cluttered and non-intuitive. I find myself longing for the simple KISS principle that is obviously adhered to when it comes to the postbot interface.

To be fair, i will point out what you can do with wptogo.

* formatting options (like bold, italic, etc)
* assign a current category from a dropdown
* assign tags
* add pictures
* write for multiple blogs

Tagging is wonderful. I miss this feature a lot using postbot. So, i will give some credit to the wptogo developers for including this. However, not being able to manage your categories pretty much seals the fact that wptogo is just not powerful enough to do the job.

It is my opinion that while postbot lacks a few features that all wordpress users will miss, if you are going to blog on-the-go, postbot is the way to go.

My final market rating is 2 stars for wptogo. Sorry, guys, go back to the drawing board.

This post is coming to you from my G1 using the postbot app. I searched the market for “wordpress” and out of the 25 apps returned, only two of them were interfaces for a wordpress blog.

Postbot is simple, but it does the job (with limitations).

What can you do?

1. Write up a new post.
2. Save a draft of a post and come back to it later.
3. Add/remove images to your post (which I did…notice my brother and the trusty beer bong).
4. Assign a category.
5. Add a new category.
6. Submit the post.
7. Handles multiple blogs.

That’s it. There is definitely not a lot to this app, but what it does it does well. I am not going to list the limitations, because they seem fairly obvious to me.

I am giving this app 3 market stars. It does what it does, but it doesn’t do much else.

Edit: I am editing this post using the g1 app “wptogo”, which I will review later.