No Blogger App on iOS App Store

Yes, this disappointment gave me more than good enough reason for me to pick the pen sorry phone sorry the good old laptop to express my horror at finding this out this morning!

I had deleted the Blogger App to make space for some music, assuming I could always download it again, as I usually do with several apps, to overcome the "16 GB woes" of my dear little iPhone 5, a gift, I have no mind to part with. 

Oh on that note check out this one if you don't already know - http://www.mophie.com/ - which is now available through the Apple website as well.

This morning having the initial symptoms of a writing urge (thanks to some inspiring writings such as http://www.sindhusankar.blogspot.com and http://www.raudri.blogspot.com that I read and re-read after a long time) I cleared up other clutter from my phone and went looking for the Blogger App via the Search on the App store.

Not finding it there I was confused and tried to find it in my "Purchased Apps ----> Not on this Phone section" list. I drew a blank when I could not find it there either and re-tried both ways before it stuck me as worryingly odd.

Googling the problem, actually brought this link up - https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/blogger/DHXxVoEzMPU;context-place=topicsearchin/blogger/category$3Aios%7Csort:relevance%7Cspell:false

Apparently it's been out since Feb this year and I had not noticed it! (roll eyes: of course since I obviously did not look for an App that I already had).  I would have appreciated some form of notification via email or such from their users list!! (Ya I know I am traditional like that, expecting email notifications!!!)

There are NO GOOD FREE BLOGGER APPS on the iOS at the moment.  A big gap in the market and I am surprised there was no official announcement.  I understand the blogger user base, mostly personal bloggers, has waned and IS quite small in the face of worthy competitors such as Wordpress but it's always hard to face the truth as a nasty surprise!! (I could hear google and Apple going "You belong to a group of people that is so small that it is negligible.")

THIS got me back to the predicament of moving away from BLOGGER and even the whole argument of how (Personal) Blogging is dead, now that everyone prefers to go back to FB to like or comment where every blogpost is auto-shared to begin with, announcing to their "readers"!! 

Having successfully avoided or not seeing any new value in the Tycoons of the new age of always connected world, has contributed to me being a Tumblr (really any social network other than FB) retard and somehow denying the existence of the well established Wordpress!! 

I know! I know! I have considered Wordpress several times in the last so many years since BLOGGER started its slow decay but what can I say, the loyalist in me always reproached me into quietude!  Not really the AdSense loyalist, mind you, for I have made, not a single dollar from it yet, in all of my almost 7 years with it!  Ha! Beat that! :)

I even tried GHOST a few months ago and somehow did not think I blog enough to be paying for a blogspace.  May be I will make the move to Wordpress or a new Blog space.  Or not at all, coming across some new way to write/post that is not Blogging. No I am not talking about the microblogging platforms made for short attention spanns and word misers,  I am quite (unbearably sometimes) generous and find it hard as it is to cut short, thank you!

What do you think, have you found any other new ways of doing things around here? What BLOGGER Apps do you use on your iOS devices?









 

OneNote and EverNote

Evernote clearly states that you can't edit an attached file on a phone.  

Could use a clear statement like that from OneNote too!  

#cantOneNote2013  

Ennayum arasiyal vaadi aakkitteengale!

 

Ennayum IT blog eluda vechiteengale!

 

As I have stated many a times before, I am no geek nor a tech wiz of formidable experience or knowledge!

 

But I am forced to continue expressing review-like-opinions due to my experience trying to work with a few popular apps on my iPhone 5 with iOS 7.

 

It was a simple task of trying to open a text file attachment on my mail (app) and editing it or at least even 'selecting all' and pasting into my blogger app.

 

To make the long story short:

 

1. Evernote would only accept the file from the Open In action on my mail box (or even from browser mail) and keep it as is - an attached text file into one of its notes.

 

Thankfully though I found Apple confessing this limitation(?) explicitly on many of their forums or help topics.

 

2. OneNote 2013 mobile app though kept it more of a left to interpretation and common sense may be as some of you Wiz's might call.

 

Alas! I am not a power user and I am a mere mortal that is usually a READ ONLY user.

 

Anyway, it was not clear that until I wasted a lot of time searching around and checking various forums before my accepted that my TEXT file was suffering Unrequited and even Unacknowledged love towards OneNote 2013 mobile app.

 

An early indicator was that (made sense too), it said it needs an underlying app that can work with these attached/embedded files to work with them.

 

3. After several futile attempts it was apparent there were not many simple (free apps) that would do this job though this seems quite basic for a smart phone to handle.

 

I am aware that I can convert it to different file formats that work better and then use it with various free apps such as PDF, DOC etc..,

 

But my "precious" is a 16 GB lightweight and while experimenting I conscious of the space that each of these apps claim.

 

4. Another nasty surprise came from another close to my heart - the very "friendly" Google!

 

Yes, Google drive accepted my TEXT file graciously into its folds but did not let me Select All the lengthy content of my text file either to do a simple COPY!

 

Neither would it interface with Google Docs and let me open try opening it there.

 

5. The work around was to open drive in WEB mode from Safari and then open the TXT file.  Then I could send it to Evernote, not as an attachment this time but a friendly Note, with all of the TXT file contents laid bare for me to Select All and Copy.

 

  6)    The easiest route thus far though is to Simply Drop Box and use it on my Phone where I don't need another "Editor" but rather can open, Select All and Copy then and there on my phone's Drop Box!

 

The reason I chose the other routes initially were because I use these Apps already for other purposes and it was natural for me to go there and try given all the world singing praise for Evernote and OneNote for much more advanced things than copying All content of a mere TXT file attachment.

 

Well, guess I lost a little bit of my "dumb" through this exercise and it was definitely worth it for I learnt about a few of these below:

 

1. IFTTT -- https://ifttt.com/ --- I am going to try this out this weekend and see if I can overcome my disappointment of finding Google Drive not being able to talk to Blogger or Google Docs directly sharing files across (talking about all of them iPhone apps here specifically). 

 

Google family iOS (phone) apps needs to be a little more sharing and caring!

 

But it's not limited to just that, you can apparently set up rules for various Apps and Sites to interact.  Worth checking out if nothing else.  Worth skipping a Sunday afternoon nap… :)

 

   2)    Plain Text (free and basic) and other editors (paid and rich ;)) from Drop Box!  Or their many rivals in the paid apps world of course.

 

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/49557/how-to-open-and-read-txt-files-using-iphone

 

   3)   Wonders of OneNote 2013 and Evernote.  Yes they do a lot of cool stuff unlike the boring and dumb - open a TXT file attached without an underlying text editor app!!

 

   4)   Little tips and tricks with each of the apps' settings on my phone and some of them lying in disuse (if not use, at least remove them).

 

  5)   Got me started with drop box - an app that I didn't care to use much before.  I know!!

 

Glad I hit a problem and spent some time waking up my common sense and bringing in some absent "app-sense"… :)