Andrew Girvan

My Mobile Social Media Creation Adventure

You can read my five-part blog about visiting Amsterdam, created entirely using my iPhone 3 at girvgoesdutch.tumblr.com

It’s been far too long since I’ve managed to get a post up on here. The main reason for that is that I’ve recently started working for Whatsonstage.com as their Acting Deputy Editor. Its a fantastic job, and one that I would not have been able to get without the experiences that posting on this blog and interacting with all of you have brought me.

The purpose of the five blog posts which proceed this one, which you might have noticed were quite a different style of post to my normal ramblings about the state of theatre and social media, were actually part of a bigger experiment to see if I could create content on the go at the same level of quality as I can when sitting at my Macbook. All of the Amsterdam posts which I uploaded before this one were created entirely on my iPhone.

At the time I was writing the posts I was working entirely on iPhone OS 3. Since then Apple have updated the whole iPhone line including pushing the new iOS 4 to devices like the iPhone 3G I was working on. Improvements in iOS 4 include spell check and up to 5X digital zoom on the camera. Features like multitasking and video aren’t enabled on the 3G, probably a very good thing given the way that my phone slowed to a crawl on installation of iOS 4. Luckily Apple have since updated the operating system to 4.0.1, making a monumental change to the phone’s performance and everyday usability.

The major issue I had with the iPhone was the lack of physical keyboard. The blog posts were by far the longest pieces of content I have written on my phone, I normally make a point of not doing anything more strenuous than texts and short emails on my phone, normally having my Macbook in my bag for anything longer or more complicated.

The iPhone keyboard is mighty impressive, the way it manages to join the dots, compensating for the fact that the only way to type on the thing it to tap madly away at it and then watch it almost magically form words out of the mess, is outweighed only by the software’s shortcomings. Problems which I occasionally noticed whilst writing texts suddenly became major issues which really held me back when I was trying to create longer posts. The predictive text does a wonderful job of compensating for mistyped keys in almost all cases, except when you accidentally hit either the return, backspace or shift keys. The fact that what you are writing can be so thrown off by the phone adding random line breaks or capital letters can be truly frustrating.

I was uploading my content through the WordPress iPhone app. This was another weak link in the chain of content creation. I had already set up the WordPress app to work with my blog and had used it to tweak posts, mainly whilst commuting. Whilst the app might work quite well in some respects, in others I found it really confusing. When you try and hand code hyperlinked text, not an easy task on the iPhone keypad, the app does eventually pop up and offer to help you insert the link. From what I could tell there is no way whilst in the full page editing mode to tell it that you want to add a link, the only button which is obvious is the photo button, which works totally counter intuitively but eventually lets you add a photo into your post which you can copy and paste to the right point in your post.

I also had to go into a previously posted blog entry and find how to hand code the page break code to stop the entire posts showing on my blog homepage. This involved going into my blog through Safari and playing copy and paste from there, not an easy task given the particularly flaky wifi I was contending with at my Amsterdam hostel, part loading pages and taking an age to switch between editing, source and previewing views – all of which I needed access to!

The only other issues I had that I was planning on mentioning in this post was my lack of ability to edit images on the go. If I had been searching for an image editing app in the comfort of my own home I probably would have spent a few minutes on different app review sites working out how their prices and functionality compared. As it happened I went for the first app I found which said it could crop images. If I was going to blog on the go then the images I posted with my blog posts would also have to be cropped to the 16:9 ratio I’ve been using across the rest of my site. Amsterdam is an incredibly beautiful city so taking the pictures was not an issue, but getting them from the phone’s gallery into an app, after a quick search in the store I went for an app called Cropulator [iTunes link] which did the job but was no where near as easy as throwing an app into Photoshop would normally be. The resulting images were eventually cropped to 16:9 but sizing remained an issue. Actually getting the photos into the posts using the WordPress app was also an trying task.

The lack of multitasking on my current iPhone really hindered the amount of research I was able to do. Whereas my normal blog writing process might involve having a few dozen Chrome windows open, checking the names, spelling and links, it was a huge hindrance to have to exit the WordPress app, Google something quickly in Safari and then have to copy and paste the results back into WordPress, all the time waiting for apps to load, close and connect to the internet. It was a very stilted way of working and something I would not do out of choice.

All in all I managed to turn round five passible pieces of content using nothing but the phone I had in my pocket. There is a photographers saying, that the best camera to have is the one you have with you. I made a point of not taking my Macbook with me to Amsterdam because I didn’t want to have to secure it in the hostel or have it on my back as I went exploring the city. The best blogging machine I had with me at the time was my phone and that was what I used. I have to admit that I went back and did some light editing on the posts once I was back on my Macbook, knowing that they were going to exist on the site for quite a while and that people might not necessarily acknowledge they were the fruits of mobile labours.

The other thing which I did not dare to do was any kind of site maintenance. Knowing how hard it was to get onto my site through Safari and how often the free wifi I was using would drop out, I wasn’t really in a position to do anything like update plugins or take advantage of the 3.0 upgrade WordPress made available whilst I was away.

An experiment I am glad I undertook, and something I learnt a lot from, but something I wouldn’t want to repeat in a while. I’ll be clinging onto my Macbook for dear life. Thank you very much.