Blogging
Microsoft developer talks about Office 2008 update issues
Erik Schwiebert is one of the lead developers on the Mac Business Unit team under the Microsoft banner. I find their position constantly interesting — even in these enlightened days of Safari for Windows, many dyed-in-the-wool Mac users still consider Microsoft the enemy, and yet the Mac BU has always been like a kind of diplomatic envoy. We have to use things like Office and Entourage, so we cautiously let them across the border, regarding them like strange visitors from the other side of the wall.
But maybe that’s just all in my mind. Recently, the Mac BU released an update for Office 2008, and lots of users, apparently, have suffered from error problems while trying to install it. So many, in fact, that Schwiebert has responded to the problems on his blog, saying that the problems are most likely because users have deleted or otherwise messed with files inside the installation, causing the installer to abort. And that strange Mac BU/Mac users fragile truce comes into play here as well — he specifically calls out Xslimmer and Monolingual, two programs that delete often-unnecessary files in OS X, for causing the issues.
There’s a workaround floating around, but Schwiebert warns it leaves the application suite in a possibly unstable and unsupportable state. Unfortunately, Schwiebert doesn’t really offer any solutions (other, we guess, than to reinstall the software so that it’s back to the full install, and then apply the update). And the alliance between the Mac BU and their users remains fragile — we’ve got to work together, but it seems that many are unhappy about it. [Read]
Popularity: 7% [?]
WordPress: our iPhone app is coming soon
Just a little while ago I wrote about Typepad’s native iPhone app, which I quite liked. Many folks thought it looked neat, but they were either running their own WordPress blogs, or using Wordpress.com’s hosted service neither of which are compatible with the Typepad app (for obvious reasons). Luckily for them, the good folks at WordPress have posted some information about the forthcoming WordPress iPhone application.
The app is ready, and pending addition to the App Store. It will work with both self hosted WordPress installs and blogs hosted on WordPress.com. You can do all the things you would expect: upload pictures, write blog posts, and edit existing posts.
The app should be available soon on the App Store for free. Once it is available I’ll be taking it for a spin and posting my thoughts. Thanks to everyone who sent this in. [wordpress]
Popularity: 9% [?]
First Look: Typepad for the iPhone
I’ve been blogging for way too long, and for a good chunk of that time my personal blog has been hosted on Six Apart’s TypePad. I’m a big fan of the service (though some might recall it was a little flakey in the early days, I’m happy to report I can recall no major downtime in the last 2 years) and that’s why I was very excited to see TypePad was coming out with an iPhone native blogging app.
Typepad Mobile, as it is called within the program itself, is available now on the App Store for the low, low price of free (of course, Typepad isn’t a free service). It is a blogging client that lets you post directly to your TypePad blog from your iPhone as you might have guessed from the name. You can also snap a picture with your iPhone’s camera and post that to your blog, or you can post a photo from your iPhone’s photo roll in just a few clicks.
During the course of my testing this app was very zippy, and it did everything I would expect from a 1.0 release. I hope to see some more blog management features in future updates (being able to approve/delete comments would be very cool).
Check out this gallery for a a quick tour of this neat little app.
Read the rest of this entry
Popularity: 7% [?]
Blogo 1.1 emerges from Brainjuice
Attention all bloggers! The nerd bunnies at Brainjuice have just released Blogo 1.1, the latest take on their Mac OS X blogging tool. Blogo 1.1 now includes support for Drupal and Twitter in addition to WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, typo, and MovableType.
The new Twitter support allows users to post tweets and direct messages from Blogo, and can even send a tweet whenever you post. Brainjuice has fixed some existing issues, as well as adding these new features:
- Support for raw image formats
- Integration with NetNewsWire and Safari
- Use of Growl for all user notifications
- New text formatting options (quotes, lists, aligned, justified)
- Custom cropping of thumbnails independently of the full-size images
To give Blogo 1.1 a try, download a 21-day unlimited trial or purchase the app for $25.
Popularity: 13% [?]
