The iOS WordPress team just announced that the 2.7 version of their app has just hit the app store. I am actually typing and will publish this post from the app.
Already the app feels very solid. I have not had any crashes or login issues that have plagued several of the previous versions. It has been sad actually because WordPress as a platform has been very stable in the last few years. The iOS team has had a rough patch there for a while but I think that they are out of the woods with the 2.7 release.
From their post about the release they mention that their focus was primarily on performance and reliability with 117 bugs being squashed. I appreciate the effort that they have put in ;-).
Testing the App
Now I will run a couple of tests to see how this new release handles things.
First a medium photo:
That was inserted easily enough. Now how about a video:
Doh! The video upload did not work. It seemed to be an issue with my self-hosted site as opposed to the app itself. The app was nice enough though to give me this message:
One other cool thing I just noticed is that the app tells you the dimensions and file size of the media that you upload:
One last cool thing – the medium option for image size was only 360px wide for my site and I would have preferred 500px wide. The app has the option to enter a custom size. I entered 500 for the width and left the height blank and when I hit the OK button it figured out the right height to keep the image proportional (honestly I that could have been there before but I just noticed it).
Different/Weird Things
There are a couple of things that are a little weird although they are not bugs.
The first is that the save button is gone. This was a little confusing when I wanted to save my post in the case that the app did crash (sorry guys!). I figured out that by hitting the cancel button that I could “Save as Draft”. I did not know whether it was saving the draft locally or on my site.
Another weird thing was that the status for the post was gone, or so I thought. I found out after I published this post that the status is actually under the setting area (gear icon) of the post. You can change the status there but I am not clear if you can do that before a post is published and what the options are.
Note – I was actually going to go out of this post to see what it looked like in a new post but when I hit the cancel button the only options were Update and Discard. There is no option to save locally once a post has been published.
The last weird thing is that when I published this post the first time the status of the post as it was publishing was “Uploading” and not “Publishing”. All the media was already uploaded so I guess it was the post that was being uploaded /published?
Apologizes to the iOS Dev Team – I just want to mention again that the things above are not bugs, they are just little things that take you back a second to figure out what they really mean. WordPress itself is so refined that it does not have many of these types of issues so that makes the ones in the iOS app stand out a little bit more. Sorry again iOS devs! I feel terrible for remotely criticizing the excellent work you have done. Please don’t take it personal, I thank you for this great app!
Conclusion
I am very pleased with the app as it has not crashed on me once. I can upload images without a hitch and that is cool. I am not sure what settings I need on my site for videos to work but I will figure that out. I feel that the app is solid enough again that I can use it on a regular basis.
Thanks WordPress iOS guys!