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.

Quicken 2006 for Mac came out recently. I’ve been using it for years, upgrading ever few years so I’ve been watching for reviews. Macintouch has several.

I purchased Quicken 2006 yesterday when it was announced. I began using the software in 2002 and have upgraded every year. This is the buggiest version I’ve ever seen. It constantly crashes, and right now, I can’t even get it to launch.

I’ve used Quicken for many years, upgrading when new versions were released. With each new version, I’ve come to expect a less reliable product. Quicken 2006 is especially bad.

I downloaded Quicken 2006 last night. It repeatedly crashed while converting the Q2005 file. I copied the file in 2005 (and dropped early data), and it crashed when opened in Q2006. I did a full export from Q2005, and Q2006 loaded the file, but then crashed on reopening. OSX 10.4.2.

These are just a few reviews, and most people only talk about the bad not the good. Still this isn’t sounding so great. I’ve signed up every year, for years, to be a beta tester. Yet I have never been chosen. I’m sure I could have helped with this.

2006 Has a few new features, but one feature that still seems missing is the use of the keychain to keep credit card and bank passwords instead of their own system. I think I may skip 2006 this time around as well.

Update 08/05/05 05:32 PM: Look-y there, there’s already an update out.

I performed the Tiger upgrade yesterday, purchasing it from CompUSA (they were having a release party for it, but it was anything but a party). While Mail was importing my emails the screen saver came on. When I tried to log back in the screen stayed black but I could see the cursor. I let it set for 45 minutes finally deciding it was in a coma and force rebooted it.

When I logged back in I found a horrific site, everything had been set to factory defaults. The dock was at the bottom with the standard set of apps, the back ground pict was set to default. Mail had no sign of my accounts and wanted to know passwords and such. MY KEYCHAIN HAD BEEN WIPED OUT! DEAR LORD NOOOOOOOO!!!! Thankfully I make a nightly back up of my home folder, which I was able to restore a copy of my keychain. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to restore it using the Backup application, because it’s stupid. I had to break into the package contents of the back up and copy it. Mail is not working properly. It will not apply any rules to incoming messages and is pretty slow to display mailbox contents. It continually downloads the same messages and instead of showing their contents gives this message, “The message from username concerning ?Message Subject? has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.” WTF?

Finally I had a heck of a time getting Safari to work. I had downloaded Saft a while back, which was still installed in Safari. It prevented it from launching, instead giving a dialog box with the option to disable it but not allowing you to click it.

Update 05/01/05 06:39 PM: What a nightmare this has been. First I want to think iBlog, because as I wrote this entry (now for the 3rd time) it crashed after saving the entry, and deleted the entry upon relaunch. I hear Ecto calling.

I tried several times to import my mail, dam good thing I make a nightly back up of my users data. But Tiger seemed to be eating itself, menu items started to disappear.. I had 25GB of free space when I installed Tiger, I was under 300MB when I gave up. System performance was horrid. Never got .Mac sync to work either.

There was only one thing to do, reformat and fresh install. Something I wanted to do anyways but it’s such a pain. I was planning on getting the thing set up right in Tiger and then cloning it so I could just import my user data, but that wasn’t going to happen. I copied what I thought I needed and to my various HDs and wiped the drive.

I’m running Tiger now and everything is much better. Still need to turn on FileVault for my account. Mail never did import everything correctly and I had to recreate all my rules. Email from the last 2 months are missing.