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App: Twittelator Pro

Type: Social Networking

Developer: STONE Design

Price: $4.99

Grade: 10/10

I touched briefly on the Twitter functionality in my IM+ app review last week.  A hybrid app like IM+ might be serviceable for someone who only tracks a few of their friends or uses Twitter mainly for messaging, but anyone who updates their Twitter account regularly and follows more than a handful of people is going to want a more robust dedicated application.

I used Twitterfon until the author decided to ad-support that obscured most of the screen.  And while Twitterfon also provided nice basic functionality, I wanted something that was more robust in the features it offered.  A good choice, too, as it appears that Twitterfon has since been removed from the app store and hasn’t been updated since the 2.0 update.

Twittelator Pro has been a robust and inexpensive solution for all of my Tweeting needs.  Twittelator offers the same basic necessities as most Twitter applications out there: friend updates, @ posts, and private messaging.  But what separated it from the competition at the time for me was the added ability to handle multiple accounts from one application, the ability to view trending topics from within the app, and a search function.

I mostly use Twittelator for the basic functions with the occasional glance at trending topics, but STONE is constantly adding new features and tweaks for users who like their apps to come with as many bells and whistles as possible.  Since I bought the app they’ve added the ability to create custom themes, shoot and link to video created on the 3GS, and even geocoding if you want everyone to know where you are while you’re tweeting.  The current theme is just fine by me, I’m saddled with an old 3G, and geocoding makes my inner privacy advocate want to run screaming for the hills, but it’s nice to know that STONE is listening to what their customers want and responding with quick updates.

Just talk to someone who bought the old TwitterFon pro app to see the dangers of spending cash on a developer who abandons their software.  There’s definitely something to be said for developers with good customer service, and STONE deserves a kudos on that count.

Twittelator has also been blessedly bug free for the several months I’ve used it.  Other Twitter applications tended to crash from time to time, but so far the only issue I’ve had with Twittelator is that it has an annoying tendency to hang for a few seconds when it’s pulling updates from Twitter.  I haven’t had a chance to see Twittelator in action on a 3GS, but I suspect that the hanging is more a problem with the processing power available on my old 3G than anything else.  Either way, it just means a bit of extra waiting from time to time which is hardly the end of the world.

Twittelator is a must-have app if you’re a Twitter power user or you use multiple Twitter accounts.  I’ve come to rely on it to the point that using Twitter on the computer just doesn’t feel right since I don’t have the range of features that are available in Twittelator.  Twittelator might be a bit more costly than other Twitter apps on the iPhone, but those extra few dollars will be well spent.

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App: IM+

Type: Instant Messaging

Developer: SHAPE Services

Price: $9.99

Grade: 7/10

One of the first questions I had when I was considering the iPhone over a Windows Mobile device was whether or not it had support for MSN Messenger.  I wasn’t too hopeful thanks to the cold war between Apple and Microsoft heating up over the past few years, but it was an important selling point since most people I talk with have migrated to MSN.  Not surprisingly there wasn’t an app from Microsoft, but I was assured that there were third party applications that could handle MSN.

When I looked through the app store and discovered that IM+ was available on the iPhone the decision was easy.  I’d used IM+ software for years on my old Dell Axim to consolidate all of my chat programs into one convenient application and knew that they’d put out a quality product in the past from firsthand experience.

IM+ provides support for multiple messenger services.  As of this writing supported services include Skype, AIM, MSN, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, and MySpace.  The ICQ support in particular was a pleasant surprise, although I doubt it will be of much use unless you’ve jailbroken your iPhone and added in a Flux Capacitor so you can talk with 1998.  When I first picked up IM+ it just had support for AIM, MSN, and ICQ, so the development team has been working hard in the past few months to make sure that all of the major messaging platforms are supported.

Signing on to various services is as simple as inputting your login information and letting the app do the rest of the work for you.  You’ll automatically sign in to all of the messenger accounts you have associated with IM+ and will stay signed on even if you leave the application.  There are options for how long you want to stay signed in as well as various sign-in status indicators that allow you to tell your friends that you’re on your phone.  IM+ also comes with a built-in autoreply function that can be enabled to send people a message letting them know you’re on your phone if they happen to send you a message while you aren’t in the application.

And there are going to be lots of times when you aren’t in the application.  Unfortunately IM+is somewhat hampered by Apple’s lack of multitasking support.  On the Windows Mobile version of IM+ a little notification would pop up on the taskbar any time I had new messages waiting for me.  With the iPhone version of IM+ you have to be in the app or set up Push notifications via e-mail to know when you have new messages.  And the Push notifications get sent to your e-mail inbox regardless of whether or not you’re in the app.

I turned the Push function off after a few days as it got annoying having my inbox spammed with every message I received during long IM conversations.  Having some sort of smart functionality that turns off the Push notifications when you’re actually in the app chatting would be a nice feature.  This problem is really more of an Apple multitasking problem than an IM+ notification problem though, so that’s only one point off for the lack of smart Push functionality.

Another minor annoyance is that autocorrect doesn’t seem to work in version 3.4 of IM+.  I’ve gotten pretty good with the software keyboard, but without autocorrect even the most accurate typer is going to find their speed decreasing drastically as small typos and switching back and forth between keyboard screens for punctuation eats up time.  Autocorrect worked fine in previous versions and this is apparently a bug that the developer is aware of and working to fix for version 3.5, but in the meantime it’s enough to knock a couple of points off the app’s final score for now.

I still think that IM+ is worth buying despite those minor annoyances.  IM+ currently goes for $9.99 on the App Store, although SHAPE has been known to have sales from time to time.  I got my copy of the software for $1.99 last year when they were trying to get some publicity.  Even at $9.99, however, I would say that IM+ is well worth the price considering the breadth of messenger services supported covered and the relative lack of bugs (the autocorrect disable notwithstanding).

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Since the 3.0 update hit the iPhone in mid-June bringing copy and paste to the platform I’ve finally been able to use my phone as a standalone blogging platform rather than a useful tool for uploading drafts to be edited on a desktop later. The only problem was that the Wirdpress for iPhone app, a buggy an inconsistently reliable program to begin with, was completely broken by the 3.0 upgrade. The dev team promised that an update was on the way, but in the meantime I decided to try out one of the other options on offer at the iPhone app store.

Any Port in a Storm

I decided to go with Blogpress based on the mostly favorable reviews in the app store.  What I found was an excellent little blogging platform that was remarkably bug free with only a few functionality issues when compare to the Wordpress app. The first concern was stability.   The last two versions of the Wordpress app had a tendency to crash occasionally or, more often, eat posts. This never became an issue with Blogpress.

Trying Out the Basics

Logging in was as simple as typing in my username and password and Blogpress was ready to go. Wordpress mobile requires XML-RPC to be enabled from the web control panel before it can connect. I’m not sure if the same holds true for Blogpress since I already had the feature enabled, but it’s something to keep in mind when using the program for the first time. The app supports HTML formatting within posts, meaning that you’ll have to brush up if you’ve gotten used to the Wordpress text editor. One function that is conspicuously absent from Blogpress is the ability to create and edit Wordpress pages. How much that matters depends entirely on how you blog and if you use pages at all, but for me it is definitely a sorely missed feature.

Basic functions such as adding tags or categories to a post performed without any trouble in Blogpress. All is not perfect, however, in the tags and categories department. Blogpress lacks the functionality to add new categories directly from the app. This isn’t a deal-breaker as it is still possible to simply make new categories in Safari and then refresh the list in Blogpress, but it is a convenience that I missed after bein able to add categories within the Wordpress app, even if that action wa likely to cause Wordpress to crash or eat a post. The second issue I found was that tags tended to disappear if you added them to a post and then edited the categories for that post. This was another minor problem as it just meant adding the tags again, but it remains an annoyance regardless.

Issues and Bugs

The biggest non-bug related issue I found was how Blogpress handled image insertion. The program offers an intuitive interface for adding photos and specifying alignment and text wrapping, and the images upload into Wordpress with no issues. The problem is that any image uploaded from your phone is sent to a shared image database hosted by Blogpress rather than to your own webspace. They also provide an option to upload to a private Picasa album, but that still leaves images reliant on a third party provider. An option for uploading to a folder wherever the blog is hosted would be nice, but in the meantime I’ll rely on HTML and FTP On the Go for inserting images into a post.

One final minor issue involve post-dated posting. Blogpress dates all posts from the time you started drafting it rather than when you post it, an annoying “feature” that also shows up in the Wordpress mobile app. And for some reason setting a post for a later time or date on the phone results in the post being scheduled 4-5 hours before or after that scheduled time when it hits server side. I tried tinkering with time and date settings from my web control panel after finding nothing that controls time and date in the Blogpress controls, but this issue rests squarely with Blogpress as far as I can tell. So be warned that any posting will require some tinkering from the control panel before being published i you want to get the time and date correct.

Is it Worth $2.99?

Despite these issues, Blogpress does provide a stable and reliable alternative for Wordpress users. The program was refreshingly crash-free, and for now the bar set by the Wordpress mobile app has been so low that something as basic as stability is enough to set Blogpress apart for now. The real question is whether or not stability alone is worth the $2.99 pricetag considering all the other non-crash related issues that come bundled with Blogpress. When I first bought the app two weeks ago as the only iPhone blogging alternative while the Wordpress app was being updated for 3.0 I would have said it’s definitely worth the pocket change. Any port in a storm and all that. Now that Wordpress Mobile 3.0 is out and appears to be finally bring all the functionality of a mobile Wordpress control panel with stability for free I’m more inclined to say bloggers are better off stickin with the free app. Blogpress might still be a viable blogging option for the other blogging platforms it supports, but at the moment its an emergency backup at best for Wordpress bloggers.

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