Prior to my discovery that you can post to a Habari blog with Safari on the iPhone, I purchased iBlogger for the iPhone. It’s from the same developers of ecto, a desktop blogging client. It’s currently only priced at $0.99, which for me is a price I’m willing to pay to test an app. It supports all of the popular blogging platforms, as well as the generic metaweblog API, for which Habari has a plugin available.
Connecting the app to my Habari install was very easy, if I recall it even auto discovered the endpoint (example.com/xmlrpc).
As far as functionality, I do not know if because the generic metaweblog API is being used, and sites using engines like Moveable Type or WordPress, but the options are currently pretty sparse (as of v 1.0.7). Habari’s plugin doesn’t support posting images, so the only options really are:
- adding your location - the app inserts a link which opens to a Google map
- adding links - an easy UI for adding a hyperlink.
- tagging - this “feature” seems very weak. It doesn’t pull the existing tags from the site, a common feature in desktop blogging clients, and in my testing, keeps the previous post’s tags on subsequent posts. Might be handy if you expect to tag all of your on-the-go posts the same thing, but I don’t see it that way.
iBlogger does support multiple blogs, otherwise, I have not found any additional elements. For $0.99, I suppose one can’t complain. Since all of my personal sites are on Habari, I haven’t had cause to look at any of the other iPhone blogging clients. I understand the WordPress app is free and open-sourced, I’m sure at some point, most likely out of boredom, I will look at it. Ultimately, as many people have pointed out, typing on the iPhone doesn’t lend itself to the phone being a real blogging device.
However to get that in the moment feel, having a stable option with with a decent feature set would be nice to have. Thank goodness with Habari and in iPhone, you don’t need a secondary app.
