Posterous, the increasingly popular minimalist blogging service, just launched its first iPhone application this morning. The app, called PicPosterous, allows users to upload pictures and videos to their blogs. Until now, the only way to upload this content was to email it to Posterous. The developers of the iPhone app still have to work out some kinks, but once the company fixes these issues, PicPosterous could quickly take over email as the most convenient way to upload media files to Posterous.]]>
Minimalist Blogging Done Right
When Posterous launched, the only way to upload content to the site was to email it to post@posterous.com. If you hadn't already registered an account, Posterous would automatically set up a blog for you and email you back with all the details. The iPhone application follows a similar philosophy, though with a strong focus on pictures and videos. You don't have to register for the service to upload pictures - your new Posterous domain name will appear at the bottom of the screen.
Another nice feature of the app is that you can easily add new pictures and videos to an album without starting a new blog post.
Good, But Not Perfect
Not everything is perfect, however. While the app does a nice job with media content, you can't actually use it to forward links or just straightforward text to your site.
Once you are registered with Posterous, you can also choose to forward your images to a number of services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or your own blog. From within the app, however, you can't control where your images go, though you can turn Posterous' auto-post function on or off from within the app when you start a new album.
Some earlier reviews of the app noted that any image that wasn't taking in landscape mode would appear on its side once uploaded to the service. In reality, however, it just takes a few minutes for the site to detect the orientation of the image and the problem will correct itself automatically.
Overall, this app is a good start. If you are at an event, for example, you could easily snap pictures and videos from within the app and upload them to your Posterous blog within seconds. Thanks to Posterous' ability to auto-post your files to other services, your friends don't even have to come to your site - the images will just go to whatever service they are already on.
The app brings Posterous' philosophy of keeping things very simple to the iPhone, though sometimes to the detriment of the user experience. Until the Posterous team fixes some of these issues with the app, we are more likely to just continue to email our media files and texts to Posterous than to fire up PicPosterous.
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