Useful Mac OS X Terminal Commands – 25,983 iPhone [...]]]> Just checking the blog stats and looks like we had our 100,000th visit yesterday! For those who are curious, here are the top five articles of all time on Art Of Geek and how many page views they’re responsible for since this blog’s start back in September 2006:

Useful Mac OS X Terminal Commands – 25,983
iPhone unlocked, operating on Rogers Wireless in Canada – 17,652
Classic Lode Runner, on your Mac OS X Dashboard! – 6,484
Set Safari’s window size with one click of the mouse – 4,254
Switching ISPs: Good-bye, Bell Sympatico. Hello TekSavvy! – 2,388

Seems a lot of people are coming here looking for Mac OS X Terminal command solutions. To all of you who have helped me reach this milestone, thank you!

You can now edit your entire post, [...]]]> A while back I wrote a review of the (then) new official iPhone blogging app from WordPress. Well, it’s been recently updated and from what I can see, they’ve resolved the limitations I identified back then, and added a bunch of new features to make it even more functional.

You can now edit your entire post, even if they contain the “more” tag. You still can’t add/edit optional excerpts though. The addition of a landscape keyboard will make this even easier. Previewing of blogs not hosted by WordPress.com works well, provided your theme supports this WordPress feature.

In my original review I mentioned that only wordpress.com hosted blogs supported mobile previewing, but I think it was simply my blogs theme which was the limitation. I’ve since moved to a theme which supports the latest WP features and I’m able to preview my posts as they will appear on my real blog. Very nice.

In addition to managing your posts, WordPress for iPhone now allows you to create/edit pages, as well as moderate comments, including marking comments as spam. The latter addition will be most welcome to any mobile blogger who gets a lot of comments as it gives you a convenient way to clear through your comment queue during idle time when you’re out and about rather than when you’re at home or work and busy with other stuff.

So nothing earth shattering. You still can’t use advanced editing tools and still no cut & paste, but iPhone OS 3.0 will be taking care of the latter sometime this summer. In the meantime, if you’re a WordPress blogger and you haven’t already checked this app out, or haven’t touched it since it first came out, then it’s definitely worth a second look.

While the [...]]]> If you’re both an iPhone user, and have a blog hosted or powered by WordPress, then you have something new to get excited about. WordPress for iPhone and iPod touch was released late yesterday on the iTunes App Store! I’m putting it through it’s paces by composing this post on my iPhone 3G.

While the app is very light on features, it has all the basic essentials for writing and submitting new posts, as well a editing existing ones. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com, then you can even see a preview of your post in your site’s theme, however, those who host with an alternate hosting provider (or like me, on their own server) will see their post displayed with a generic theme. Hopefully a future version will offer the option to launch Safari to view a preview generated by your own server.

It even let’s you insert photos from the photo library or camera roll on your iDevice as well as taking photos with the built-in camera, right from within the app. Coupled with firmware 2.0′s ability to take screenshots, this could become an iPhone software reviewer’s dream come true.

So what are the limitations? The app only let’s you edit existing or write new posts. That’s it. There are no features for doing any other administration of your site for now, so we’ll still need to use mobile Safari for viewing/editing comments and performing other administrative tasks. Also, those of you who have become spoiled by the GUI editor or even the basic editing toolbar are going to have to brush up on your HTML and CSS, because all formatting has to be applied the old fashioned way.

Another shortfall, or what appears to be more of a bug, is that if your post includes a “more” tag to display only an excerpt on the main page, you won’t be able to edit any part of the post that comes after the more tag. It’s like the mobile WordPress app sees the more tag as the end of the article. There also doesn’t seem to be any support for optional excerpts. If like me, you like to only display an excerpt on your blog’s front page, this is going to be an issue. You can still use the app to write the post, but you’ll have to apply the excerpt manually via the web editing tools before you can publish your final post.

Probably the greatest limitation is one not in the app itself but in the iPhone OS: the lack of cut and paste. I’m not sure if my writing style is rare or not, but frequently when penning longer posts, I tend to move sentences and paragraphs around a lot during the editing process. There’s simply no way to do this short of deleting and re-typing… A LOT. Something I’m just not likely to do. I suspect this will make me a better writer, as I’ll be forced to think more carefully about what I want to write before I type it.

Where the lack of cut and paste really hurts though is with inserted photos. Since the app inserts photos at the end of your existing post text, you can’t move them around without writing down and retyping a lot of HTML code.

Again, you could get around this by planning your post ahead of time and inserting photos at the exact points in your post as you are typing it. If I decide I’d prefer to insert them earlier in the post, I’m SOL. Hopefully a future version of WordPress for iPhone/iPod touch will give you the option of inserting photos at any point in the post. But of course it would be better if Apple just got off their ass and gave us an elegant cut & paste solution already.

Limitations aside, I highly recommend WordPress for iPhone and iPod touch to anyone who has a blog powered by WordPress and would like the freedom of submitting or editing posts while on the go. Bloggers who use excerpts however may only find it useful for composing their post as they will still need to apply the finishing touches via the web interface.

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate by August [...]]]> WOOT! Rogers has just announced a special ‘limited time’ promotional 6GB data plan for anyone purchasing an iPhone 3G on any voice rate plan on a 3 year contract for only $30 extra per month! From the press release:

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers
who activate by August 31 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of
6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any
in-market voice plan. For example, with 6GB of data, iPhone 3G users can visit
35,952 web pages, or send and receive 157,286 emails, or watch 6,292 minutes
of YouTube videos each and every month.(xx)

Fido has announced the same promotional offer. I’m sure some will complain that it’s still not unlimited, but I really defy anyone to realistically use more than 6GB of data on an iPhone in a month. This my friends is the plan that is going to move a LOT of iPhones. My only complaint is that it just got a lot harder to get your hands on an iPhone 3G this Friday.

Now the questions that’s nagging at the back of my mind is, is this an example of Rogers reacting to the will of the people and/or pressure from Apple Inc., or was this just the final step in a very well planned marketing/promotion plan? I mean, think about all the free publicity Rogers has gotten, and consider the fact that they have spent next to nothing to promote the release of this market-changing device. I’m beginning to think we’ve all fallen for a brilliant viral marketing campaign. If this is the case, hats off to Rogers, well played sir, very well played indeed! If not, then hats off anyway for showing that you do care what your customers think.