I’ve recently been playing with WordPress for the iPod Touch and iPhone. It’s a very simple application which allows you to write posts while you’re on the go, and post them to your blog over whichever network connection is most convenient.

My impressions so far are that it seems to work pretty much as advertised. You can review blog posts written by others, change their status or edit them, and add new posts. You can even attach photos that may be on your device – although there isn’t really any way to take photos from the touch, so iPhone users will be the only ones to really benefit.

Overall – very simple and does what it says on the tin. It doesn’t solve your bad iPod typing (if you have fat fingers like me you might be struggling to write longer posts without them reading like Klingon) but it does give you another way of getting your musings up on a blog from your cafe of choice.

Overall, I’d give it 3/5.

Just got a letter, from a source that will remain nameless… It was addressed to “Ben BLAUNITEDKINGDOMOPF”. Sounds like someone needs to rethink exactly what parts of the address field get auto-completion…

SSH is undoubtedly a useful tool and the iPhone and iPod Touch are great portable ways of connecting to networks; put both together you can be a sysadmin on the move! So what are the options for this? The Apple AppStore has a few SSH clients, I decided to take three – SSH, iSSH and TouchTerm – out for a spin. (more…)

The new iPhone SDK requires that developers upgrade to OS X Leopard, which is a nice excuse for most of us to drop 100 bucks on a new operating system that does, err, exactly what the old one did. I am sure I’ll come across some amazing new feature that I couldn’t live without soon enough… Obviously there is the addition of TimeMachine, but funnily enough I was already doing backups.

One thing I was expecting was a seamless upgrade. I was sorely disappointed. The first complaint from the Leopard Installer DVD was that my disk had the wrong partition map. I upgraded my macbook’s hard drive a year or so ago, and apparently had selected APM instead of GUID when I installed. To fix that, I followed the instructions at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2007102511133285 which took several hours (LOTS of copying data to/from external drives). This involved the use of an excellent program called Super Duper which I am happy to report does Just Work.

The next complaint was harder to resolve. The verification process failed half-way through installing. Skipping the verification resulted in a failed install (not on my main drive, on my backup!). Googling revealed that apparently this problem was not uncommon, and was related to after-market RAM upgrades (that’s me) – though doing a full RAM soak test revealed no problems at all. I eventually managed to install the thing by restoring the DVD onto a partition on my external drive, and then booting from that.

The iPhone SDK was, fortunately, easier to install!