I recently tried out the WordPress app for the Ipad/iphone. Interesting idea (editing and managing your wordpress blog on the go. I didn’t expect it to be perfect or without problems, but what I really didn’t expect was that it would commit one of the cardinal sins of programming: Thou shall not trash a good user’s saved data.
After installing the app, I started a new post, and after about every 5 minutes, I saved the post. I was rewarded with an indicator on the left of the screen stating that my post was saved locally. After an hour, I saved a last time, and started a new post and saved it as I went along. However, my previous post didn’t show up in the list. I thought it might be already published. Nope. Perhaps it is a problem with the list of saved files not refreshing, restart app and try again. Nope.
A quick search on the net, and I found out that losing saved posts is a common (known) problem with this app, see “posts vanish?” discussion on the wordpress site.
It looks like the developers hope that problem will be fixed in the next version to be out in a couple of weeks. Ok, fine. But what really disturbs me as a user is that it appears that previous versions of this app have also had the same bug:
Beware the WordPress App For iPad
Posted by Bryan Wolfe on: August 9th, 2010, 9.13 am
Blogger and website owners take note: the Wo
rdPress app for iPad is not your friend! As I mentioned in a previous article, one limitation of the iPad is being unable to publish articles using the WordPress web application with Safari. Quite simply, it doesn’t work thanks to photo import limitations and an inability to review articles using the application’s visual feature.
In the last week, I stumbled upon an even bigger problem.
The WordPress app for iPad is supposed to allow users to draft and publish articles on WordPress-created sites, outside of the normal web application. Regrettably, I have experienced a terrible bug using the app.
When users save a post or page using the app, strange things can happen. If, for example, you save a post as a LOCAL DRAFT, it sometimes saves the entry as a PUBLISHED post. Since I (and other) bloggers use the LOCAL DRAFT feature as a first step in the publishing process this is most troublesome.
Imagine writing a first draft of a post and suddenly seeing it live on your website! Sure, you can delete the post. However, if your posts are tied
to automatic Twitter notifications, a problem remains. Instead of clicking on a Twitter link and heading to a site article, readers are left with a “PAGE NOT FOUND” error. This is unacceptable and makes a website look bad.
Yet, the problem is actually much worse. Sometimes, LOCAL DRAFT posts are actually published over an existing post! One draft article, for example, on “OBAMA GOES ON VACATION” copies over another article called “SUMMERTIME CONCERT.” Again, this is maddening and unacceptable.
You can read the rest of Bryan’s post here.
When you use an application, you are extending a certain level of trust to the developers of the application–if I use this right, I will not lose my data. In turn, developers receive your trust (and often money) that they represent their product correctly. Certainly, users have to remember to save files in case of a crash, power outage or other problem. And sometimes a file become corrupted due to a file system problem or other issue.
To have a bug several times in the version history of your app, that simply loses or erases data that was saved properly, destroys all trust in the application and the people who released it. And folks simply will not use an application that they don’t trust. As I heard recently at a meeting: “It takes years to build trust, and seconds to destroy it.” Or in my case, about an hour.
In short, don’t install WordPress for the iphone/ipad. And I’d wait a year or two before trying/trusting it again.
Scott
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