19th
Big bag of hurt
Tumblr 1.1 for the iPhone is out. App Store Link
Reblogging is still a big bag of hurt. In case you thought that might have been important enough to get working on the iPhone.
It does other things. apparently.
Yes, reblogging is still as broken as it used to be, if not more so: there now seems to be no way to cancel a reblog without quitting the app. The Cancel button is inexplicably missing, there’s no Back button anywhere in the interface, and clicking on the Tumblr logo opens the desktop Dashboard in a pop-up.
As far as I can tell, all the things that were awful about the 1.0 Tumblr app are still awful in the 1.1 Tumblr app, except that now it doesn’t reload your dashboard at page one every time you breathe on it. So that’s nice, at least.
But by far the worst misfeature is the way it displays photo posts. The iPhone OS provides a perfect solution: the two-finger pinch/stretch gesture, which dynamically zooms in and out of images; plus, you can double-tap to make any image instantly resize to fit the screen. It’s precisely this feature that makes web browsing on an iPhone more comfortable than on any other mobile device.
Yet the iPhone Dashboard intentionally disables this great feature, instead providing just two choices of image size: thumbnail (way way too small) and 100% (way way too big, so you have to pan around to see the whole image). In other words, the OS has a fit-to-screen feature built in, and Tumblr’s developers actually wrote extra code to disable it. What a tragic, boneheaded mistake. The workaround used to be turning off the iPhone Dashboard, but that option’s gone now.
(Tumblr actually isn’t alone in making this mistake. The iPhone version of Flickr Mobile does the same stupid thing, but at least Flickr provides an app that’s actually usable.)
I say this with love: it’s time for Tumblr to grow up. Fix the bugs. Hire usability experts. Build a rich API and test, test, test. Get your stuff working so well—make your user experience so utterly painless—that you can do silly things like Sharks vs. Cats and Dashboard marriage proposals from time to time without looking like college kids drunk on venture capital.
