Tag: iphone apps
Make Your WordPress Blog More Like Tumblr
by Ranju Chaudhary on Oct.28, 2010, under Graphic Design
Tumblr () is becoming an increasingly popular platform for blogging and personal publishing, thanks to its growing collection of themes, simple posting style and plethora of mobile options.
Although Tumblr has continued to beef up its feature-set, adding support for pages, user questions and user submissions, the platform isn’t as extensible or customizable as something like WordPress () or Drupal (). In a perfect world, there would be a way to combine the simplicity of Tumblr’s posting types and styles with some of the deeper customizations and options of WordPress.
We might not have reached the Holy Grail of Tumblr Meets WordPress harmony, but we’re a lot closer, thanks to a new plugin and iPhone app from WooThemes, a WordPress theme development firm.
Earlier this year, WooThemes started experimenting with bringing Tumblr-styled themes to WordPress. Tumblr-inspired design is taking off on lots of platforms, but what made Woo’s approach unique was the addition of a special QuickPress widget seated on the WordPress dashboard that made posting specific types of content — a la Tumblr — very easy.
Over the past few months, Woo has released more Tumblr-style themes using this QuickPress widget. Even better, WordPress 3.0 was released with support for custom post types, which makes adding special elements like a category icon or post-specific styling more automated.
This is great if you are starting a new site or want to redesign your blog – but what if you already have a pretty established site and a design you quite like? Wouldn’t it be great if you could add some of that microblogging functionality into your existing WordPress site? Read on for details on how to do that.
The Woo Tumblog Plugin
Last week, Woo introduced its free Woo Tumblog plugin. This plugin makes it possible to turn an existing theme into a Tumblr-like tumblelog.
You will need to do some editing of your theme files to get the Woo Tumblog plugin to work, because the plugin changes the way post title, thumbnails and post types are displayed. WooThemes has provided extensive documentation showcasing what you need to edit and add and has also included contextual help.
Woo also includes specific examples for what you need to do to add support for the plugin to the new TwentyTen theme included with WordPress 3.0.
You’ll need to change your permalink structure and add a few lines of code. It’s actually pretty straightforward. Our hope is that in the future, more theme developers will consider adding these hooks into their themes automatically.
The QuickPress Widget
Once you’ve enabled the plugin and made the changes so that different post types will appear a certain way, you can then post these types using the QuickPress widget on the WordPress dashboard.
This is what that looks like:
The end result is this post:
Express: The iPhone App
Beyond the plugin, WooThemes has also released Express [iTunes link]. The app is $4.99 but it is far and away the best WordPress mobile experience we’ve had to date.
You can use the app with any of the Woo microblogging themes or with your own theme if you install and enable the Tumblog plugin.
The app is super simple to use and you can easily post various types of content. It doesn’t support video uploading — something that the latest version of the WordPress iPhone app recently added, but it does make it easy to post various types of content and to moderate comments.
The app has already generated a lot of excitement in the WordPress theme community and lots of developers are signing up to add support for the app to their themes.
What’s Missing
As awesome as the new Woo Tumblog plugin and Express iPhone app are, there’s still a missing component that prevents true WordPress Meets Tumblr bliss from taking place. The bookmarklet.
I would argue that the bookmarklet is a huge reason why Tumblr and Posterous () are so accessible. It’s just so easy to quickly post a link or an image or a brief comment when you can auto-generate that content from your web browser. Furthermore, the iOS bookmarklets make it possible to do this from within the Tumblr iPhone apps too.
WordPress has its own bookmarklet — Press This — but frankly it’s not very good. It’s buggy, it doesn’t give you all the options you have in the main editor and it certainly doesn’t easily support custom post types.
There are rumors that better Press This and QuickPress functionality will be coming to the next version of WordPress, but at this point, users are on their own. I’ve become so despondent with the lack of a real bookmarklet solution that I’ve toyed with creating something myself that will also work with WooThemes’ plugin. Sadly, I just don’t have a ton of time.
I’m not alone. I’ve received e-mails based on comments I’ve left regarding the need for a bookmarklet from others indicating that this is a must-have killer feature.
We’re so close — we just need this next piece to really make microblogging on WordPress viable and enjoyable.
WooThemes has done a lot of the heavy lifting by releasing the free plugin and also creating the iPhone app. Wouldn’t it be great if the open source spirit could help come up with a bookmarklet solution?
iPhone App Finds Fun Things to Do Near You
by Ranju Chaudhary on Jul.30, 2010, under Gadgets, Trends
A Day’s Outing, a website dedicated to helping users find nearby day trips, weekend get-aways or quick excursions across the U.S., has just launched its new iPhone app [iTunes link], making it easy to find ways to spend these dog days of summer, whether you’re traveling with family, in small groups or on your own.
We got a chance to play with the app to see what it offers and how it compares to other location destination apps, like Goby. We’ve also got 100 copies of the app to give away to our readers (it normally retails for $2.99).
Many mobile applications utilize location, but most of them utilize it for finding a specific place, checking in as part of a game, or reading and leaving reviews.
While there is a nice niche of mobile travel guides, what’s less common are applications that are designed to help you find destinations or activities nearby. The immediate use-case for this sort of application is when you are visiting a new city or on a vacation. Say you decide to go the beach for a few days, and then it starts to rain (or I don’t know, some catastrophically awful oil leak gunks up the beaches) — if you’re not in a big city or a place that is a known tourist destination, figuring out how to spend your time, especially while on the go, can be difficult.
A Better Family Vacation Tool
The website, which is free to use and access, is a great way to find different parks, museums, theaters, special events, historical landmarks, zoos and more. What we really like about the app is that it isn’t just made for big cities, it’s for smaller cities too.
The app is pretty easy to use; it can select your location automatically, or you can enter in your location by city, zip code or street address. Then you select how many days you want the search to cover and how many miles you want your search to encompass.
You can also just search for a specific event if you have an idea of what you are looking for.
The results are brought back in a list by category, and you can also view the results on a map to see where things are in relation to your starting point.
Once you find a place or outing that looks interesting, you can access more information, including the phone number and address, and visit the website for the destination all in the app. You can also see how much admission and parking is.
We do wish that there was a way for users to leave reviews of different destinations, because that would be helpful, especially for people new to a specific area.
Although A Day’s Outing is similar in many respects to Goby, it’s focus on more family-oriented activities and historical landmarks sets it apart. We really think that families are the types of users that would most benefit from the application.
100 Mashable Readers Get the App Free
If you want to try the app out but don’t want to pay $2.99, go to this page and enter in your e-mail address. The first 100 readers will get a code to get the app for free. You can then redeem that code in the App Store
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What do you think of location-based applications that help you find local destinations rather than just restaurants or places of business? How do you find things to do when visiting from out of town?
