I find myself traveling more and more with my Acer A700 tablet. It is compact, light and all I need when reviewing websites, blogs and PHP program functionality with clients.
Sometimes I find myself with time in between client meetings; not enough time to return to the office, but enough time to get a little something done, like updating my own or a client’s blog.
Until today, I have been logging into the blogs that I maintain using the browser interfaces (Firefox, Chrome, Dolphin) on my Android tablet. When I would write in the content box for a post, the ‘browser-accessed’ WordPress would have difficulty keeping the writing area in control. No matter how many times I would place the cursor, the cursor would move serendipitously to another section of the post and insert letters in the middle of words or in the bullet above the one that I wanted to be writing in. Even when I got the cursor into the correct spot, as soon as I typed one letter, it would float to another area. It has always been laborious to make even small updates to blogs.
So, I recently downloaded the WordPress for Android app to my Acer Android tablet. This is my first test using it.
The interface is familiar. Abbreviated list of dashboard menu items on the left. Writing area to the right. Plenty of room to write. When a menu item is clicked on the dashboard, the dashboard slides out to the left, and a list of the posts, pages or comments appears in its place.
There are icons in different sections of the window. Pretty easy to figure out what each icon does: a Plus sign (+) for adding a post or page, three lines stacked on top of each other toggles the display of the dashboard menu that overlays the current listing of posts, page, or comments.
Already, I am impressed with the app. I’ve written quite a few words so far with my WordPress for Android test, and I’m typing as I normally would; two hands on the keyboard and always in control of the location of the cursor. I’ve tried portrait and landscape orientation, and both work as expected. I prefer the portrait because the QWERTY keyboard takes up less space and I can see more content at a time.
The icons for Bold, Italicize, Underline, Strikethrough, Link, Quote, and More… are located just above the keyboard on the left. The icon for including Media is above the keyboard on the right. Let’s try that out…
I just clicked the icon for media. There are four choices:
- Select a photo from the gallery
- Select a video from the gallery
- Take a new photo,
- Shoot a new video.
I chose take a new photo, and you can see the shot I just took of the coffee shop I am in. The photo was automatically included with a link to the full size photo on its own screen. The photo was included as 2000 x 1500 pixels. [Using my desktop machine, I edited the image to shrink to about 1/5 of that size.]
The WordPress for Android editor is in HTML mode. I’ve searched around and have not yet seen how I can edit the photo in WYSIWYG (View) mode to add an ‘alt’ and ‘description’ and remove the link. I have not found a way to generate the photo dialogue box.
The spellchecker/suggested spelling drop down list works well.
Okay – so I have edited this over several days. There were more paragraphs and I had manually formatted a bulleted list because there are no list options on the app menus. In the course of saving and logging in and out of WordPress for Android, I lost the version that I had wanted to publish. I had saved it for one more read-through, and now it is not available on my tablet nor in WordPress on my website. I can only imagine that I had had a bad connection and it really didn’t save, because just about every other version is listed in the “versions” section of my WordPress blog.
Truth be told, I am currently finishing this up in my office using my Dell ‘desktop’ setup. Not wanting to lose another version, I decided to take the safe route to getting this published.
So, moving forward, I will continue to use the WordPress for Android app for smaller blog articles and minor updates. As I learn more about the application, perhaps, I will be emboldened to write longer blog posts such as this.
What about you? What is your experience using the WordPress for Android app? Any insight into what I might have done incorrectly?