think differently big

Three Improvements for Tumblr Email Posting

I have no idea how many “tumblers” — or is it “tumblrers”? — are using the post by email functionality, but I know it is quite big on another platform ☞ Posterous. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should probably start with the ☞ help section.

While most of the functionality is there, I have found three things that once solved would make the posting by email feature complete.

Feature: Draft and Queued Posts

When you send a post by email it is published right away. This is probably what you want in 90% of the cases. But sometimes you may want to publish it later or you’d like to work on the post a little bit more before posting it. And Tumblr supports both “Drafts” and “Queued posts”, but not when using the email posting feature.

Supporting this feature would be trivial: if you want to have an emailed post saved as “Draft; just include the token (draft) in front of or by the end of the email subject. The same for “Queue”: include the token (queue) in the email subject. That’d be all!

Development effort: I’d speculate it’s close to zero.

Feature: Post entry end markup

When sending a post by email, the body of the email is considered the body of the post. Nothing unexpected so far. But some of us are using email signatures (most of the time these are automatically included so it is quite impossible to remove them) and I’m pretty sure that we don’t want that part to be considered part of the Tumblr post.

The solution is once again trivial: if you want to mark the end of the post include the token !end and nothing beyond that token will be considered. End this sort of token is in alignment with the token used for ☞ Markdown formatting support: !m.

Development effort: I’d speculate once again that’s close to zero.

Bug: Posts starting with a link are always “Links”

This is a small bug I have noticed: if you send a “Link” post that has a description, the Tumblr system confuses it with a normal “Text” post. I’d say that this behavior is quite wrong: each time a post starts with a link, then it should be considered by Tumblr as a “Link” even if it contains or not a description.

Development effort: let’s see how quickly can the Tumblr team get it out ;-).

Unfortunately, so far my feedback to Tumblr team remained almost always without a response. Please help me out by voting this post to get Tumblr team’s attention. Thanks!

iPhone Tumblr App 1.1 Finally Available

It looks like the new iPhone Tumblr app version 1.1 is available now on the AppStore. I have already installed it and I’m gonna compare the list of new features with my wishlist.

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The first missing feature I’ve noticed is the lack of photo upload for text posts. I still had to rely on the old trick of creating a private Image post and then reference that image from the text post (nb getting the image URI might be quite tricky though)

So, here is a quick status update on the features from my iPhone Tumblr 1.1 app wishlist:

1. Custom iPhone bookmarklet that triggers the app: there is a mention of a new bookmarklet for links, but I couldn’t find any additional information. Anyone found anything related to this?
2. Multiple drafts and Queueing posts: these features seem to be present in the Tumblr 1.1 version
3. Editable access: available in this new version (1.1)
4. Sync or Offline mode: not sure this works. Basically it would offer the user the possibility to continue to write posts while the iPhone is not connected and then once online all these updates will be pushed live. There is a mention of “Save for late”, but I’m not sure these are equivalent.
5. Multiple photo posts: not supported yet.
6. Text entry image support: not supported yet

Bottom line, it looks like most of my bets were correct and the new iPhone Tumblr 1.1 app will offer a better experience for the users.

Update: Related to “Save for late” functionality, it will allow you to create 1 offline post of each type, but there’s no support for multiple offline/temporary posts.

Update: Darn iTunes doesn’t allow me to copy text so here is a screenshot of the iPhone Tumblr 1.1 app release notes

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Tumblr 1.1 iPhone App: My features vs Official Details

Finally I am hearing more official details about the upcoming Tumblr 1.1 iPhone app.

I will wait for the actual upgrade before concluding if I’m happy or not, but so far it looks like some of the 7 features I betted on for the upcoming Tumblr iPhone app will be on the update, while others will probably be considered for future versions.

TheTumbler Tumblr iPhone App Goes on Promotion

Alternative Tumblr iPhone client: TheTumbler goes on promotion for $.99 (from initial $1.99). I assume this comes in reaction to the announcement of the official Tumblr 1.1 for iPhone and my advise would be to wait for the official Tumblr release as I really have high hopes of it (even if none of them was confirmed)

Tumblr, Posterous and the iPhone Community

I am just wondering if Posterous has a larger ☞ iPhone community than ☞ Tumblr. Judging by the number of posts, I’d say that it looks so.

Another aspect would be the iPhone support for Tumblr vs Posterous. I heard that Posterous is into email big time and that Tumblr has submitted a new iPhone app version, which I hope to bring a lot of new features.

But at the end of the day it is about people. So, what do you think?

Tumblr iPhone 1.1 is off for review!

I’ve been quite unhappy so far with the Tumblr app. I mean for read access it was quite good, but definitely not something that helped me push out new posts. So, I really hope this messages is not just pure PR.

Calling this release just a 1.1 was hard because there’s so many ne–

Well, you’ll see.

— via david via Jeff Rock

Now let me do an exercise. I’d tell you what I’d like to see in the upcoming version and then once it will become available we will cross check the list.

1. Custom iPhone bookmarklet that triggers the app. Basically instead of the normal web bookmarklet, this one would instead fire up the Tumblr app and get the fields filled in.

2. Multiple drafts. Supporting multiple offline drafts would allow someone to create and work on multiple posts.

3. Sync: if you have multiple offline drafts then you’ll want to push some of them live once you get connected.

4. Editable access: the first version allowed posting new entries but there was no way you could edit existing ones within the app. The new version would provide both types of operations

5. Queueing posts: this feature was completely missing from the iPhone Tumblr app.

6. Multiple photo posts: this feature was launched by Tumblr after the iPhone app was out, so hopefully it will be supported by the new version.

7. Text entry image support: this feature was launched just a couple of days ago and while I’ve always missed it, I haven’t tested it yet (basically I replaced the normal process with a Tumblr specific one: create a private post with the photo and then reference it from the new entry). I’d love to have this feature in the new Tumblr iPhone app, but I think the chances are low.

I guess that would be all on my side. So, let the bets begin!

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