A screenshot of the Wordpress iPhone app in action.

A screenshot of the Wordpress iPhone app in action.

The addition of copy and paste to the iPhone with version 3.0 corrects a mobile computing oversight of Newtonian proportions on Apple’s part and brings the popular smartphone one step closer to being the perfect mobile blogging platform, but it still isn’t quite there yet.

The biggest problem with writing from the iPhone in the past was linking.  Including links directly to sources is the foundation that blogging is built upon, and removing that functionality simply because there was no easy way to copy links into a post meant that the iPhone was limited in its blogging scope.

Now those issues are almost a thing of the past.  I say almost because copy and paste was only one part of the mobile blogging equation.  The rest of the problem now lies with Wordpress and their mobile app, which is something of a necessity since the Wordpress control panel is one of the few sites I’ve come across that Safari Mobile renders with less than perfect fidelity.

Stability is still the major issue for the Wordpress Mobile app.  Random crashes and a Save button that has an irritating habit of disappearing every time you add a new category to a post or look at your iPhone funny are the rule rather than the exception at the moment, though with the advent of copy and paste its easy enough to write a draft of your post in a stable environment isn’t going to arbitrarily eat your post like the built-in Notes app and then copy the text over to Wordpress when you’re ready to publish your draft.  Still, the workaround is a less-than-ideal solution.

I don’t feel like I can complain too much since the Wordpress app provides mostly excellent functionality for free, but I will say that I would gladly pay a premium price for a stable blogging app that provides the same functionality as the free version.  I’m sure I’m not the only blogger out there with a lot of frustration and a little bit of disposable income who feels the same way.  Just sayin’, Wordpress Mobile devs.

Additionally there is currently no support for inserting a link into a post, though this is hardly something I can fault the developers for since there was no easy way to copy links until two days ago thanks to Apple’s oversight.  Again there is a workaround for this, there’s always a workaround, but it forces the user to jump through hoops that shouldn’t even exist in the first place just to insert links.  After copying a post from Notes to the Wordpress Mobile app you have to save the draft to the web.  From there you go to your Wordpress control panel in Safari, go to the draft, go to the HTML editor, and from there you party like it’s 1999 and enter all of the links in your post manually with good old fashioned elbow grease and HTML.  Hardly an elegant solution, but it does have the advantage of working.

So is the iPhone perfect for blogging yet?  Not really.  Is any mobile platform short of a netbook with an air card perfect for blogging?  Definitely not, and you could argue that forking over $70/mo for 3G access on a laptop is even more less than ideal for most users, this writer included.

As much as I’ve criticized the blogging offerings on the iPhone in this post, I still have to admit that just being able to write an entry complete with links and upload it on the go is still shiny and new enough a concept that I’m willing to forgive most of the problems I’ve listed.  Of course that doesn’t mean that the problems should be ignored, and so I hope that someone at Wordpress Mobile is listening and will include better and more streamlined support for some of the features I’ve discussed in their inevitable 3.0 update.