Greg In The Desert

As I try to get back into posting interesting iPhone applications, I am still surprised at the amount of crap that is available to the iPhone store. Mac users always complained that sure, Windows has a more software available to it but most of it is crap. I think that is true with the iPhone.

The Wordpress App is not one of those crap applications (that is, is you have a Wordpress installation you can use it with). I’m not sure why they created an all new iTunes entry for the 2.0 app when both the 1.0 and 2.0 apps are free.

Although I find the iPhone to difficult to write entire blog posts on, the Wordpress app is great for creating basic drafts that get me started, fixing existing posts and managing comments.

Wordpress 2 is available on the iTunes store for free.

WordPress 2 is the only iPhone app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress, users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.

What’s new in version 2.0:

- A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
- Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
- New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
- Passwords are now stored in the keychain
- Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
- Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
- Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
- Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
- Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
- Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
- Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded

For support, please visit our forums at http://iphone.forums.wordpress.org — we aren’t able to respond to support requests submitted in an iTunes review.

iTunes 7.3.1 is suppose to fix this issue.

I would not recommend downloading iTunes 7.3 unless you absolutely need to. I was greeted to this error: “The iTunes Library file cannot be saved. An unknown error occurred (-50)” after iTunes attempts to upgrade the library. It seems every version of iTunes has some problem or another after install, but this is the first time I’ve had some such error.

Apple’s message board indicates that many people on Mac OS X and Windows are having the problem. I see a few people who have a large library and have the library on a external hard drive as I do, but it’s not clear that this is the cause. What seems to be the cause is some sort of permissions issue. Possibly. Hopefully Apple gets this one fixed soon.

Update 07/01/07 10:54 AM: There’s suggestions to use this Apple tech note to recreate your library. The only problem with this tech note is it will delete any customizations in the library, like ratings and playcounts. I’m going to revert my install to iTunes 7.2 until Apple comes out a fix.

Update 07/02/07 12:29 PM: MaxFixIt is covering the iTunes error now. They have several suggestions including checking for iTunes add ons, Disabling APE for iTunes and restarting in safe mode. I tired all the suggestions and none of them worked. I’m going to play with Tiger Cache Cleaner and see if it will clean up anything.

Update 08/02/07 5:55 PM: Fixed! I removed most of my podcasts, most of them were video podcasts. Once of them must have been screwed up in the iTunes database.

Update 07/06/07 3:49 PM: I re subscribed to some of the podcasts, video and audio, since deleting them all. So far there’s been no problem with any of them. They are syncing with my AppleTV and my iPod. I didn’t add them all though. There maybe some that I didn’t add that maybe causing the problem.

If you don’t like the idea of deleting all of your podcasts, try deleting a few at a time. Starting with the video podcasts. Be sure you delete the whole podcast, not just the individual episodes.

Apple has another free music sampler album for download. This is the second one, the first one is here.

Free Music