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Official WordPress app for Android

After having played with wpToGo app (though for a very short time), the announcement of an official WordPress app for Android phones caught my attention. These apps allow you to manage your blog posts and comments from your Android phone.

I fired Android Market on my phone, searched for “wordpress” and the official app was right at the top, proudly named as WordPress, just WordPress. Yea, that’s indeed the official app!After installation, I launched the app. It prompted me for Blog URL, for which I supplied http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com. For the username and password, I typed in the admin’s username and password, since I blog using the admin account. Subsequently, it allows me to manage comments, the blog posts and the pages on my blog. After playing with it for a couple of hours, I noticed the following pros and cons in the WordPress app for Android:

Pros:

• New comment(s) notification on the phone’s notification bar. You can set the app to check for comments every 5 mins to every 24 hours.
• Ability to reply to comments
• Comments moderation – approve, unapprove, mark spam
• Nice tabbed interface with readable font. Big, touch friendly buttons
• Ability to add images to the blog post from the phone’s gallery
• Ability to compose a blog post on the phone, set it’s status to publish but publish it later on the blog site via “Upload Draft to Blog”.  Useful feature, when at times, we don’t have an active data connection on the phone.
• Categories, once downloaded from the blog, are cached.
• Ability to manage more than one WordPress based blogs.

Cons

• No audio alert with the new comment alert
• Limited editor options - bold, underline, italics, link and blockquote
• The editor is not a rich text editor – the HTML tags show in the post’s text, which looks messy
• Limited options to place the images – either at the top or at the bottom of a post
• No option to delete a post once it is published, if by mistake
• No option to insert a “read more” tag

I found the WordPress app limiting when it comes to composing a blog post. This is because I like to use HTML lists (<ul>, <ol> and <li>) and I like to place images in between the post’s text. I may use the comment features – notification, moderation and reply. Someday, with upgrades and more features, the WordPress app may make it to my list of must-have Android apps.

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