Tumblrette for iPhone and iPod touch

Posted on January 20th, 2009. Written by Arron.

Yesterday, I got myself a tumblr blog for my own personal ramblings – you know how it is. Anyway, with setup I also found myself plunking down for the Tumblr App Store client, Tumblrette.

Do you have a tumblr blog yourself? Are you considering picking up Tumblrette?
Hit the jump to see what you can expect from this WYSIWYG editor …

For people new to Tumblr:

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML. Even use your own domain name.”

Basics
Being a very well designed application from the outside, Tumblrette [App Store] offers up the power and functionality of Tumblr in your pocket. Running a blog is hard enough without having to worry about when or if you are away from your keyboard, your not going to be able to get an update out on time. Tumblrette solves this – at least for you Tumblrs.

Opening the application you’ll see 3 tabs along the bottom. Post, Sites and Settings. The Settings tab is where you’ll want to head first, as this allows you to setup the tumblr blog that your edits will apply to. The app will ask for your username and password but as this is seen as the official client for tumblr on iPhone, you can conclude that your details will be safe. After you’ve entered the necessary, touching the ‘Check account’ button will check to see if the account information you’ve entered is correct. Correct settings are symbolised by the app returning a green light, and showing ‘Account Valid’.

Posting (Text)
When you come to make a post, just like your Tumblr dashboard, you have options as to what you want to post. These include: Text, Photos, Quotes, Links, Chats and Audio. Let say we wanted to post a new text update to my tumblr blog. I’m going to goto the ‘Post tab along the bottom, and then tap ‘Text’. From here (as I’m sure you can imagine) it’s very simple. Next, enter the title of your post, and the contents – but what’s this? “Open advanced options”?

Following on from the apps slick UI, tapping this slim bar will slide up all the advanced options available for the type of post your viewing. These include: Whether you wish the post to be private or not, which blog you want the post to apply to, the date and time this post is to be (or was) posted and finally you have the ability to tag your post with keywords.

Want to hide the advanced options? That’s just a tap away too. Now posting Text, Quotes, Links and Chats are all pretty much the same in Tumblrette, but there are two other post options which the UI of the post editor will adapt to.

Posting (Multimedia)
If you have a tumblr blog yourself, you probably don’t just limit your blog updates to text. There’s bound to be some multimedia used in there, and just like on the web dashboard, Tumblrette offers compose functionality for both audio and photo, straight from within the app. Here comes the downside. As per the current SDK restrictions, Tumblrette for iPhone does not offer the ability to compose or edit video posts.

Ok, lets first start with creating an audio post. Tapping audio from the ‘Post’ tab will bring up the editor. On the right hand side of the edit field, you’ll find a full audio recorder. Record, stop and play. You don’t need to hold anything, just tap ‘Record’ and go wild. Once done hit ‘Stop’ and then ‘Play’ to check your audio turned out the way you wanted it to.

What I found even more interesting was, if you forget you’ve recorded something on that specific saved note, Tumblrette will visually warn you that you are about to completely overwrite your previous recording (seen above), when you request to record another note.

Next? – Photos. Photos are a part of any blog, but definitely more so with Tumblr. Tumblr blogs are known for minimalist themes. One or two columned layouts. A place to tell the world about yourself. Tapping photo from the ‘Post’ tab will bring up the editor. On the right hand side of the edit field, you’ll now see a placeholder of a framed camera. Tap it and the built in photo API of iPhone OS will pop up asking you if you want to take a photo right then and there with iPhone’s camera, or choose one already in your library.

Once you’ve chosen a photo a preview is placed in the right frame. Tapping the left region of the screen allows you to attach a caption to your photo. Once your completely happy with your post, just hit the ‘Post’ button top right. Your updates will be published to your tumblr blog immediately.

All in all a pretty slick looking app, with great functionality to boot. However, there is one major flaw to Tumblrette which could seriously affect it’s sales. How on earth could they leave out the native ability to edit published posts? Yep – once a post is published, your going to want to login at Tumblr to edit it. Sucks right?

I bet by this point your wondering to yourself what that ‘Sites’ tab does right in the middle there? Well, due to Tumblr not having an API for it’s dashboard, there’s no way to access your dashboard straight from the app itself, without getting help from a web-kit based browser window. This is exactly what the ‘Sites’ tab is. Touching it will load your Tumblr dashboard (plus the sites you are following) as you would see on your Mac or PC. It’s extremely non-intuitive from the outset, Why? Because this is the developer’s substitution for the ‘Edit’ functionality. Let me tell you, editing your post on a 480 x 320 pixel screen, in a non-iPhone formatted UI really does take the biscuit.

Extras
The app supports ‘Markdown Syntax’ [Wiki]. This basically allows you to ‘pretty’ up your posts with the usual text formatting; Bold, Italic, Underline etc.. Alongside this Tumblrette also has a ‘Save for Later’ feature. While it doesn’t have a specific ‘Section’ for these saved posts, the app will save the post you were last creating in the editor for that post-type. Saved posts are marked by a blue circle appearing next to the post-type on the ‘Posts’ tab. Quitting a post prematurely by touching the ‘Close’ button (top left), will cause iPhone OS to throw up it’s menu API which will have options for ‘Clear Post’ or ‘Save for Later’.

Overall
I’m really struggling to tell you what I think of this app. On one hand it’s genius. It’s slick, and gets the job done. However, the blatant omission of something like the ability to natively edit already published posts, is dire. It’s a WYSIWYG editor for tumblr blogs, but WordPress also have one of these for WP blogs, and they somehow managed to add the ability to edit existing published posts from within the app itself. Rightly or wrongly, I bought Tumblrette under the impression this was the case.

For those of you who are just looking for a way to compose and publish posts to your tumblr blog on the move, this is the app for you. For everyone else, I highly recommend you wait for the necessary support to be added.

See the Demo Post: Here

Current status: If you need it, go for it. If you don’t, dont.

Reviewed at: v1.2
Reviewed on Firmware: 2.2
Download size: 0.5MB
Released on: 02nd Sep 2008
Retails for: £1.19

Compatible with: iPod touch Gen 1 & 2 / iPhone Classic / iPhone 3G