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.

[Updated 11/2/06] This script used CURL to download data.

I was looking for a way to get weather from the internet without using 3rd party programs like Weatherman for use with Indigo. There’s nothing wrong with them but they don’t always provide the information I need. I started playing around with the experimental feeds that the NOAA website provides and was able to parse that data with Applescript. The script requires XML Tools, a free scripting addition that provides the XML parsing. From there you need to get the correct NOAA XML URL for your state (note, use XML NOT RSS.).

The XML feed does not contain as much information as Weatherman provides. But if you don’t want to pay for Weatherman at the moment this is a good alternative. Also note that this is an experimental service by the NOAA, it could go away.

Recently Slashdot had a article about the availability of free data by the NOAA. Software providers don’t want you to have free data since that hurts their revenue stream. If you think free data from the NOAA is important then please send them feedback.

Download NOAA Weather Script.scpt