Review: Wavelog
Score:
55%
Version Reviewed: 1.00
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
Using your mobile phone as a blogging platform has always been attractive – coupled with the rise of the camera phone sites such as Moblog:UK which sprung up to give us all an easy way to share and be proud of our pictures; and all just one button away.
But blogs are still, along with most of the internet, driven by text, and being able to blog from your handset has been the goal of many applications that I’ve looked at for All About Symbian. Now it’s the turn of Wavelog to come under the microscope.
First thing to point out that this is for a specific flavour of weblogging software, namely Wordpress. While this allows them to focus on making an application that hooks directly into one specific piece of software, rather than trying to accommodate many flavours, it does seem strange to limit yourself – even to arguably the most popular platform. Implementing an open standard posting format using XML-RPC would give Wordpress support plus a number of other platforms as well. XML-RPC is used, see update.
You’re also limited to just one blog site, which severely limits my use of the application. Do I set it up for my regular blog, my travelling blog, or the one that talks about the Sony PSP (to choose but three).
What you can do is multimedia. Wavelog allows you to add in images, audio or video that you’ve captured on your handset, and add it into your blog post with ease. Although you’ll need the full version, as multimedia isn’t available in the trial version.
But I don’t think that Wavelog will have a huge number of registered users – the interface is the wrong side of ‘technical’ for all but the most dedicated bloggers. For example, you don’t start typing away. You have to go to the menu, add in a ‘text’ element, click on this and start editing the contents. Confusingly, you can then add in another text element to the right, or below, the existing post in a basic template/block editor. So basic that you can’t move or delete elements once they are in place.
And then, when you save them, you’re given the regular file browser to place the draft into the regular file system. Quite frankly, this was barely acceptable when S60 was Series 60 on the Nokia 7650 – nowadays.... I’m sorry, but this is just not the friendly face of computing. Couple this with the counter-intuitive text entry system, there’s not a lot to recommend Wavelog.
It’s definitely not for those new to blogging, and experienced bloggers are more than likely set up Wordpress’s built in “send an email to become a post” feature, which covers 95% of Wavelog’s functionality for free.
-- Ewan Spence, January 2008
Update, Jan 31st; Wavelog have pointed out that the posting system used for the single site you set up is in fact XML-RPC, and I'm happy to alter this.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at