shauny.me
The Tumblr iPhone app is so frustratingly bad that I find myself only using Tumblr on my Mac or iPad (using the browser rather than the app).
Problems include:
- Formatting problems on posts often means the text overflows and you cannot read it all.
- About 1 in 5 times, enlarging an image will cause you to scroll to the very top, so to find your place you have to do some rapid scrolling down (which reminds me of an iPhone game the boys put on my phone, 100 metre sprint). This leads to me choosing very carefully which images to view and then regretting it if I have to scroll.
- It is a big improvement having links open in “new window” and keeping your place but then reblogging will take you to the top again. This is worse than the above point because the pages you viewed have to be loaded again: scroll, tap, wait, scroll, tap, wait. This leads to me not reblogging using the app.
- As Marco created both Tumblr and Instapaper I continue to be baffled as to why there is no “read later” button.
- This is more of a problem with Tumblr than just the app but I wish there was an option to read your dashboard in chronological order. Then not only would series of posts make sense but it could be easier to catch up on posts you missed. Tracking posts you have read would be the icing on the cake.
- Also lately the app has been crashing, this could be due to the new iOS or my old iPhone 3G.
I’m quite confused how the guys and gals at Tumblr can put up with this, I can only conclude that they do not use the app.
Tumblr iPhone App 1.2
Just in time for your shiny new iPhone 4! Here’s the new stuff:
- Native reblogging. Reblog posts to any of your blogs using the native editor. Even peek at the original post if you need to.
- German localization. Sprechen Sie deutsch?
- Enhanced photo post options. Click-through links and uploading via URL are now supported.
- ‘Send to Twitter’ switch now respects your individual blog settings.
- iOS 4.0 compatibility and multitasking!
- Bug fixes and optimizations. Booooring.
Download or search for “tumblr” in the App Store.
If they weren’t too busy trying to sound hip, Tumblr might realise that it is really annoying to get these emails because there is no clickable link to see the person’s profile.
Hmph.
Marco.org: The lesson of the Sidekick failure
Yay!
I try to keep a nice equilibrium of people/feeds I am following on Tumblr/Twitter/Reader so I have just enough to read each day but not too many that I have to miss some updates.
I can’t help but think that you’re supposed to just accept that things will go by unread, and skip them. But I just can’t do that; if I find that I have not checked Tumblr in a long time then I will go through every page and read each item.
Am I doing it wrong? Being too obsessive?
Now testing: Automatic post recovery
Ever lose a post to a pesky browser crash? Never again!
Tumblr now captures a copy of your new post every few seconds, just in case your browser crashes or you accidently close the window.
Brilliant, I was just thinking they should do this yesterday.
I realise that the content on my blog varies quite dramatically. You may be interested to read about my opinions and links regarding web design but may not be impressed with my militant atheism.
Or perhaps you read my blog just to see what is happening in my life and are not interested in all this technical stuff (although I need to increase frequency of life posts!).
The lack of any PHP on my tumblelog really limits what I can do, but I have managed to do some trickery with the Tumblr Theme tags and CSS to create some cute ‘tag tabs’.
You can now filter my posts to Web–only, Science–only, Quotes–only and Life–only by clicking the relevant tab. If there is any interest, I will write about how I managed to highlight the correct tab.
Have fun filtering!
Find your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, or MSN!
I guess no-one told Tumblr that you should never do this. As Coding Horror puts it:
As a software developer, you should never ask a user for their email credentials. It’s unethical. It’s irresponsible. It is wrong. If someone is asking you to code this, why? For what purpose?
I’ve been exercising and weighing myself on Wii Fit every day, and I find that the graph is what really pulls me in: I can see my progress over time. It is a great motivator!
If only Nintendo allowed you to subscribe to an RSS of your graph, or at least put a widget on your blog. So I went and created my own.
I created the Tumblr-powered Wii Fit Graph with the following goals:
- Easy to update! It must take literally seconds to update my BMI each day
- Easy to view; I need a simple graph, like the one on Wii Fit
- Embeddable: I want to be able to embed the graph on my website.
I used jQuery and the plugin Flot to plot the graph. I can update the graph each day either from the Tumblr home page or from my Tumblr iPhone app.
The graph is automatically generated from the last 15 days’ results. And I can embed this chart on any page using iFrames (not ideal but not a deal-breaker).
Feel free to visit the graph and view the source. The graph is generated from the innerHTML content of several divs, each of which is a day’s post in Tumblr. The Tumblr markup to encapsulate each post in it’s own div is as follows:
{block:Posts}
{block:Regular}{block:Post1}<div id=”d14”>{/block:Post1}
{block:Post2}<div id=”d13”>{/block:Post2}(etc…..)
{block:Post15}<div id=”d00”>{/block:Post15}
{Body}</div>{/block:Regular}
{/block:Posts}
I also run through them again, putting dates in a separate div.
Now you can flip between Dashboard pages with the left (←) and right (→) arrow keys. This is great if you’re trying to navigate the Dashboard with a sandwich in one hand.
Let us know if you catch anything acting funny.
This is great - I usually browse tumblr at lunch with a sandwich :)
One feature I think is lacking at the moment is the ability to keep track of the posts you’ve read. Maybe I’m too used to Google Reader - maybe you’re not supposed to read every single post - but I find myself reading pages and pages of posts, only knowing when to stop when I get to a previous post I remember that I’ve already read!
One of the biggest problems with subscribing to lots of RSS feeds (I have around 90) is duplicate content — a particularly interesting story is blogged, reblogged, twittered and linked to by many different sites that you read.
Having all your subscriptions in one service such as Google Reader or Tumblr should allow for some better organising. Perhaps they should add an intelligent feature which scans your feeds for duplicates (this could easily be done by seeing if multiple blogs link to the same page, contain the same heading or even image!) and group them together as a sort of summary.
This would be very useful!
Site-specific browsers Using site-specific browsers you can separate the websites you would normally keep open in a browser tab, and instead have them in their own application. This means not only can you easily organise the windows and switch between them, but if one of the websites hangs or crashes the browser, your other apps are safe. I use Fluid which is for Mac OS X Leopard, but Firefox also have a cross-platform project called Prism. Shown here is my site-specific stack, in my Dock.
I have been tumbling here for 9 months and never noticed the archive! Its pretty sweet.
Also, 9 months? Wow, time does fly. Here’s to more tumbling in the future!
With a dash of RSS, a hint of Google and the handy feed import feature of Tumblr, my Tumblelog now has a life of its own!
As I read stories that interest me in Google Reader, Digg stories, or upload photos from iPhoto (to my Google Picasa web album) they will show up on my tumblelog. Which then gets sent to Facebook.
When I am done redesigning my website (and I am working on it! Take a look!) it will be a great place to see what I am interested in, and stories I think are worth sharing!
