Livejournal.app for iPhone: it's about time!
So, since I'm up at 7AM for no apparent reason, let's try out this Livejournal client that I downloaded from the iPhone App Store a few days back.
Seems to work pretty well... Fairly plain, but a darn sight better than using the web interface (full-featured version doesn't play too well with MobileSafari, and the "mobile" version is lamentably basic).
It's got buttons right above the keyboard to insert the HTML for pix (if you've got an LJ account that lets you upload pix), LJusers, LJcuts, bold, italics, and strikethrough, & of course links. The text options are done pretty cleverly: you hit it, it drops the open tag, and it stays "depressed" (in the button sense). When you're done, hit the button again and it drops the close tag. Nifty, and frankly more than I was expecting.
Downsides that I can see: no offline-saving support or Twitteriffic-like browsing of friend feeds. The second one I suppose is a bit much to ask, and MobileSafari serves that purpose well enough, but the first is saddening- what if I come up with a brilliant post while I'm without a network connection? Yes, I suppose I could write it in the Mail or Notes apps and email it to myself once back online, for later posting from my actual computer, but this is the future, dammit. I shouldn't have to kludge like that.
That said, however, I'm very pleased to have an iPhone client for Livejournal posting at all, and I'm a little disappointed that it took this long for one to appear. I guess Livejournal's just not the Internet powerhouse it once was (and I can't imagine the legitimate Russian market for the iPhone is that large). The version number's only 0.5.1, which bodes well for the idea of future updates, and as it stands it seems to suit the majority of my needs. Thank you, livejournal app developer, whomever you may be. Hell, add that offline save-for-later-posting, and I'd even pay a buck or two for this thing.
I enabled, for this post anyway, the option that lets this app add an ad for itself to the end of your post, so we'll see what that looks like... and, of course, if my LJ account ends up being taken over by a bunch of Russian teenagers, won't we all have a good chuckle in the morning.
Oh, and the keyboard doesn't rotate into widescreen. Every single app that uses the keyboard should be able to rotate to widescreen, it's so much more comfortable for some people (i.e. me). But when freaking Mail still doesn't do that, a third-party Livejournal client can hardly be blamed.
Posted via LiveJournal.app.