iPhone app mini-reviews

I already installed the 2.0 firmware on my old iPhone and downloaded a few of the free applications from Apple’s new App Store.

Some of the applications like Exposure, SmugShot, NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, and Remote seemed very polished, while others like ShoZu still seem pretty rough.

Twitterrific works almost exactly like the desktop version. NetNewsWire is a pretty basic RSS news reader that syncs perfectly with the desktop version or NewsGator Online.

Exposure is a great way to browse Flickr. You can view your own pictures or those of your contacts. One of the best features is Near Me, which uses the iPhone’s location capability to find pictures near your current location. SmugShot is a very simple application that lets you take a picture with the iPhone’s camera and immediately upload it to SmugMug. I’d really love to see something similar for Flickr.

Apple’s free Remote application lets you control iTunes or an Apple TV from your iPhone. Its display on the iPhone looks exactly like the built-in iPod player, even displaying the artwork and current location in the song just as if it was playing on the iPod itself.

Unfortunately, ShoZu is pretty troublesome. It took several times before it would accept my Flickr settings and log in successfully. The application will only let you set up a WordPress.com blog, not a self-hosted WordPress blog like this one. I was able to set up this blog as MetaWeblog from their website, but it won’t recognize it in the iPhone app.

3 thoughts on “iPhone app mini-reviews”

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  2. Hey there,
    Sorry to hear you had trouble with ShoZu on your iPhone, we've never seen any issues like this ourselves but I am happy to help you get it sorted.

    First of all, the simple fix of course is to give your phone a reboot to ensure that there's nothing else in memory affecting ShoZu. Next, if you are having trouble setting up sites through the app on your phone, have you tried loggin in to our website instead? Just go to http://www.shozu.com on your computer and enter your username and password. You'll see it is basically a remote control for the app. You can remove any sites you see here with errors on them, and add Metaweblog and Flickr from here instead, you can also add 'CC' sites which work just like email CC so your images will go to all of your sites at the same time. Now come back to your phone and hit the little refresh arrow down the bottom of ShoZu (in the center) and it will bring down the changes you made.

    Hope this helps with the issue. But if you do find a problem with our app that is repeatable, we'd love to hear about it so we can fix it.

    Thanks,
    Mark Jambas

    mark.jambas@shozu.com

    Reply
  3. Hi,

    I added this blog from the website using metaweblog, but when I logged back in from the phone, it showed the blog with a Flickr icon, wouldn't let me change the settings, and then changed the icon to a black ball.

    I finally got Flickr set up, but it won't upload reliably. I had to try several times to upload, one of them showed up hours later on Flickr. The last one I attempted never showed up at all. I hope these problems can be fixed.

    Reply

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