Recently I wrote about buying an iPhone and introduced to be writing about iPhone applications suitable for the academic life. Well, here it is: I found the WordPress application for iPhone highly suitable for mobile and academic blogging (on WordPress).

Devesigned by ‘automattic‘, the same people who wrote the WordPress code (“code is poetry”), released their WordPress application for iPhone today. I downloaded it and found myself writing this post within a minute. Really, that’s how well it works! The app has been redesigned and in nothing it resembles the WordPress admin screen.

The interface allows thevuser to sign up for several blogs. I only had to fill in the URL, my user name, and password. When logged in to one of my blogs, thirty of my recent posts are shown and can be easily read and edited. Using a single button, a new post is created, including a title field, categories, and tags. All the categories created on my blog were shown on my iPhone, but it is also possible to add more categories on the run. Drafts are stored locally, so that you can write even when not connected to the internet.

Not all that is possible from the WordPress admin screen, can be done using the iPhone app. For starters, you can’t do anything but write a blog post, but I feel that in that limitation the strength of this app lies. Some other limitations are due to the fact that we’re writing from an iPhone: for instance I don’t see myself writing posts with a thousands of words length due to the relatively small keyboard.

Some other things might perhaps be added to future versions of this app, however. For instance, it is at present not possible to add a link to another page or blog on the web. Also, you can’t manually change the permalink of the post, nor can abstracts be added to the posts.

All in all I find this app strongly suited for writing a quick post on your Worspress blog. No long and detailed academic posts can be expected to be written using this app, but I do believe that it is very well able to result in nice concise contributions. Especially in a dynamic environment where you don’t want to be lugging around too much equipment, for instance on a conference, I see how this WordPress app can be put to great use.

Soon I will be attending the useR! 2008 conference in Dortmund. I already planned to do some conference live-blogging, so now I have found myself the tool to do so.