Tumblroo Impressions

• The built-in browser is great. Being able to browse links from the dashboard is a huge improvement, especially since the iPad lacks iOS 4.
• Being able to view, edit, and publish drafts is great, but figuring out how to edit drafts is a little confusing.
• Actually, the same can be said for changing the post type when you’re first creating a post. Using the gear-icon typically means “settings,” not “post type.”
• Looks like it parses Markdown pretty dang well. Sweet.
• Thoroughly enjoying the design. It integrates so well. I just confused Mail for Tumblroo, because they look and feel very similar.
• Writing a draft in Markdown, saving it as a draft, then editing it and adding more Markdown doesn’t get the draft re-parsed. That’s annoying.
  • Update: Interestingly enough, the draft is properly parsed by tumblr when viewed in Safari (on a computer or iPad). When viewing the draft in Tumblroo, the markdown is not parsed. Makes me think that Tumblroo doesn’t actually do any parsing, and it downloads the drafts rarely. Thus, if you edit a draft, it won’t get re-parsed until it’s re-downloaded, and I can’t figure out how to force that to happen.
  • Update2: Apparently pressing the “Reload” button at the top of the draft lists will(!) force a complete re-download, and will display a re-parsed entry. You just have to move off of the currently selected entry then back onto it to display it.
• It seems to call out the original poster of a post on reblogs in the Dashboard. Original attribution has been a longstanding beef with tumblr (recently reaffirmed by Khoi Vinh and echoed by John Gruber), and this seems to try to rectify that in-app. Strangely, it doesn’t apply the same treatment to posts in Your Posts.
• Editing a longer Draft doesn’t work quite right. It seems to truncate the post. I’ve had to resort to writing this post in Simplenote and copying it into the Draft in my Dashboard because I’m not sure if Tumbleroo is going to mess it up. Bummer. See update, below.
• Reblogging is easy, both a single-tap reblog, and a “Reblog with Comments” option. Rad.
• Wish I could see my saved searches, or perform a search from Tumbleroo. I’m not even sure if the API supports this, but it would be a great feature.
• I (surprisingly) haven’t tried to create a photo post from Tumbleroo, but word is that you can’t upload a photo from the iPad’s Photo Library. Seems like a no-brainer feature, but looks like the Tumbleroo team is fixing it. See update, below.
• I really wish that there was an easy way to copy a post’s URL. To get the URL of the Tumbleroo post above, I had to invoke the “Email Post” action, and copy the URL from the in-app email. Just putting a URL bar in the browser would solve this. Hell, it would be super-slick if the URL bar was hidden until the user scrolled above the top of the page. That way the URL bar is there when you need it, but out of the way when you don’t.
• The fact that the email is composed and sent in-app is pretty damn nice.

The bottom line is that it’s easily the best tumblr experience on anything that isn’t a computer. I really, really like this app, and I’m excited to see it grow up.

Update: A new version of Tumbleroo was made available last night. It seems to have added support for uploading photos from iPad memory,and may have fixed the long text post issue. It’s still confusing how to edit a long text post; the interface for editing a post doesn’t clearly note that there’s a method to scroll down — you have to tap & hold to place the cursor, then drag it downward in a painfully slow scroll. But it does have the whole post available to be edited. Honestly, I’m not 100% sure at this point that this wasn’t the case in the version that originally shipped. This functionality may have been there all along. My criticism stands, though, that the interface for this particular interaction stands to be improved.