…but possibly short on subtance. We’ll see.
I’ve Been Waiting For This
I’ve been waiting for months for this app. Squarespace submitted this thing at least a month ago, and Apple has seen fit to keep it tied up in the approval process for some unknown reasons. I’ve been using Squarespace since May, for Pixelsnatch, my gaming site, and I’ve really wanted a better way to post on it from my phone. Trying to using it through Mobile Safari is awful, and the email post functionality is pretty useless too. I was in Tokyo for Tokyo Game Show back in September, and it would’ve been great to post photos and text bits from the floor of the show. So now that the app is finally here, how useful is it?
It’s useful, but it’s kind of weak sauce. From the Squarespace app you can post text and photos (multiple photos even!), adjust post time and save drafts. There is offline functionality, so you could write a post on the subway or a plane, and sync it to the server when you get a signal again. Be forewarned, if the app is closed without saving, it doesnt remember the text you entered. It sucks though that there’s no landscape keyboard either. Turn your phone on its side, and it’ll just stare at you like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick. It’s also got the run of the mill features like adding categories and tags to your posts. You can preview the site as a whole, or individual posts. If you have multiple Squarespace sites that you manage, you can log into all of them. Comment management isn’t ready as of this first release, but is coming in the next update thankfully.
The most interesting feature is the statistics feature. You can view pages views (total and unique), RSS feed subscribers, search terms, and referrers. It kinda negates my need for Ego [Ed note: Ego the app, not the psychological concept]. You can swipe through menus to check different types of page views and time periods. You can also tap on the day of the week to see page views for just that day too. Something else that’s cool about the page views statistics is that since it displays as a bar graph, you can see on which days your traffic spiked. It’s really awesome.
I have some gripes though. When saving drafts, but not syncing them, and you go back to the posts pane, there’s always a delay that accompanies reloading the posts lists. When trying to delete photos you’ve added to a post, it’s nearly impossible to delete them. I had to tap on the close button ten times before the app deleted the photo. Squarespace made their own camera roll interface, and ditched the standard iPhone interface. Looks like it should it work just the same, but taps don’t register the way you think they should all the time. Squarespace tried to be a little too fancy for their own good. Oh, and it’s crashed four or five times in the first six hours I had the app.
One last pro tip: if you have multiple writers, have them log in on the app as accountname/user. It’s not documented anywhere. Tristan over at Squarespace found my bitchy comment on his blog and emailed me how to do it.
If you use Squarespace though, and have an iPhone, it’s a no-brainer to download this free app. It’s a better way to post to your blog than whatever you’ve been doing, and it’s pretty. But it’s prettier than it is useful.
