- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Location: State Route 628, Alexandria, United States
Editorial Commentary: The preceding post, including both the text and photos, was created using two apps installed on my iPhone 3G: Dragon Dictation (Free); and BlogPress ($2.99). All of the photos were taken using the iPhone's built-in camera.
Dragon Dictation works remarkably well. With just a little clean-up of the speech-to-text conversion, my thoughts were ready for posting -- a much less tedious task than typing the entire post on the iPhone's virtual keyboard! In retrospect, the clean-up process would have been easier had I read "How to Use Dragon Dictation," the online documentation provided by the software developer. (The app has no built-in help.) And it would have been simpler to send the text to the clipboard, rather than sending it to e-mail. Oh well, more lessons learned from experience!
Want to post to your WordPress blog from a mobile device? There's an app for that. Want to post to your Blogger blog from a mobile device? There's an app for that, but Google doesn't offer one -- "BlogPress" is the only game in town. (Hello, Google -- are you listening? That's just lame!) BlogPress works fairly well, but there are some quirks I don't like. For example, what's up with the excessive white space surrounding the three photos I added to the blog post from the "Camera Roll" on my iPhone? Why not use some of that space for photo captions? (I don't see an option in BlogPress to caption photos; captions were added subsequently using Picasa Web Albums.) Although it was simple and straightforward to configure BlogPress to work with Picasa Web Albums, BlogPress committed two unforgivable sins when it uploaded the photos to Picasa: 1) The photos were re-sized from 1600x1200 pixels to 1024x768 pixels; and 2) The GPS info was removed from the photo metadata. WordPress for iOS features a setting to turn on/off "Resize Photos"; BlogPress should add a similar setting. The second problem is completely unacceptable! Aside from being handy, the main reason I use the iPhone 3G's built-in camera is that photos are geotagged automatically by the iPhone's GPS receiver (GPSr). And speaking of the iPhone's GPSr, BlogPress was able to geolocate my blog post successfully, but the map linked from the post (see "Location," shown above) is zoomed way out from the point where I was located.
In summary, I'd give Dragon Dictation a rating of 4 out of 5 stars (needs built-in help); BlogPress, 3 out of 5 stars (needs a lot of improvement). The free app works better than the fee app! Hmmm, what's wrong with that picture? Nonetheless, BlogPress works sufficiently well for mobile blogging on Blogger.
Related Resources:
Editorial Commentary: The preceding post, including both the text and photos, was created using two apps installed on my iPhone 3G: Dragon Dictation (Free); and BlogPress ($2.99). All of the photos were taken using the iPhone's built-in camera.
Dragon Dictation works remarkably well. With just a little clean-up of the speech-to-text conversion, my thoughts were ready for posting -- a much less tedious task than typing the entire post on the iPhone's virtual keyboard! In retrospect, the clean-up process would have been easier had I read "How to Use Dragon Dictation," the online documentation provided by the software developer. (The app has no built-in help.) And it would have been simpler to send the text to the clipboard, rather than sending it to e-mail. Oh well, more lessons learned from experience!
Want to post to your WordPress blog from a mobile device? There's an app for that. Want to post to your Blogger blog from a mobile device? There's an app for that, but Google doesn't offer one -- "BlogPress" is the only game in town. (Hello, Google -- are you listening? That's just lame!) BlogPress works fairly well, but there are some quirks I don't like. For example, what's up with the excessive white space surrounding the three photos I added to the blog post from the "Camera Roll" on my iPhone? Why not use some of that space for photo captions? (I don't see an option in BlogPress to caption photos; captions were added subsequently using Picasa Web Albums.) Although it was simple and straightforward to configure BlogPress to work with Picasa Web Albums, BlogPress committed two unforgivable sins when it uploaded the photos to Picasa: 1) The photos were re-sized from 1600x1200 pixels to 1024x768 pixels; and 2) The GPS info was removed from the photo metadata. WordPress for iOS features a setting to turn on/off "Resize Photos"; BlogPress should add a similar setting. The second problem is completely unacceptable! Aside from being handy, the main reason I use the iPhone 3G's built-in camera is that photos are geotagged automatically by the iPhone's GPS receiver (GPSr). And speaking of the iPhone's GPSr, BlogPress was able to geolocate my blog post successfully, but the map linked from the post (see "Location," shown above) is zoomed way out from the point where I was located.
In summary, I'd give Dragon Dictation a rating of 4 out of 5 stars (needs built-in help); BlogPress, 3 out of 5 stars (needs a lot of improvement). The free app works better than the fee app! Hmmm, what's wrong with that picture? Nonetheless, BlogPress works sufficiently well for mobile blogging on Blogger.
Related Resources:
- Farmers Markets, Fairfax County Park Authority
- Fairfax County Master Gardeners - I stopped by the advice table. (See Photo 1, shown above.)
- Westmoreland Berry Farm and Orchard - I spoke with farm owner Chuck Geyer about Virginia wineries, and bought some sugar snap peas. (See Photos 2 & 3, shown above.)
- Twin Springs Fruit Farm - On the strength of recommendations by other patrons, I bought several greenhouse-grown tomatoes; they were delicious! (Not pictured in blog post.) [See a couple of photos shot the following week: wider view, Twin Springs "booth"; closer view, ripe tomatoes.]
- Farmers Market Picasa Web Album featuring full-resolution, geotagged, and captioned photos
I agree, I like Dragon better than Blogpress as well. I have to be careful with Blogppress, because sometimes it keeps the picture from my last post and puts in in the current post when you preview. It is frustrating and I don't hit publish becuase I can't tell which picture it will use!
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