Post to any mainstream blog from any Java enabled mobile phones, review of Trutap (1)
In my previous post, I introduced wordmobi, a mobile blogging tool for Nokia Symbian s60 mobile phones. Though wordmobi works well for writting blog on mobile phones, based on Python s60 and only supporting wordpress limits its usage. In fact, there is a software making it possible to post to any mainstream blog from any Java enabled mobile phones. Its name is Trutap.
Trutap is not only a mobile blogging tool, but a universal solution for social networking on general mobile phones, at least it seems to be the ambition of the developer of Trutap, though I will only introduce how the mobile blogging feature of Trutap is working.
I have already written a post about Trutap more than one and half years ago. However, it seems that the feature to send post to blog based on wordpress was not working at that moment. After long time of development, I succeeded to send post from my Nokia N82 with the latest version (2.0.2) of Trutap, which has more features and a better looking UI. However, though the version 2.0.2 of Trutap could be installed on my Nokia E63, I had problem to type text with E63′s full keyboard in this version and the official website of Trutap doesn’t have E63 in their supported mobile phone modes list. I tried the version for Nokia E71 on E63, which is version 1.0.5, and it is quite the same as what I tested more than one and half years ago. Though I could type text with E63′s full keyboard in version 1.0.5, the testing post I sent to my blog didn’t appear on the web.
In the “add services” menu of Trutap v2.0.2, users can add blogs including Blog.com, Blogger, Livejournal, MyOpera, TypePad and WordPress. There also options of Email-to-blog, Other blog and Twitter. After providing the URL, username, password of their blogs, users will have their blogs listed under the “Contacts” -> “my details” menu, which is not a so straightforward UI design to me. By choose links of their blogs, users can write their post like writing an email with subject and message body. Users can also just choose to write a new message and choose their predefined blogs from the pull-down list of contacts, which is a better UI design to me. Users can add picture captured by the mobile phone’s camera. I am afraid their is no other html options like insert links and so on. There is also an option of save to drafts. It is saved to the local draft folder of Trutap instead of posting as draft. Trutap also doesn’t support downloading posts from blogs to edit them and there is no preview before you send a post. It also took me some time to find the draft folder, which can be accessed from the inbox menu. The problem is I could not choose to save my draft from an existing uncompleted message whenever I want and Trutap would only give the option of save to draft in some cases, but most of time I just lost my modifications.
In general, Trutap is a working solution to post to any mainstream blog from any Java enabled mobile phones. But its usability needs to be improved to make mobile blogging convenient with Trutap.
[...] Trutap has some interesting features but I find it has quite some issues to use. Maybe the developer has difficult to set the target [...]
[...] to try Trutap, a Java ME social networking client, on my mobile phone again, as I am in favor of its posting blog from Java mobile phones feature. But I just could not connect to their server to get online. Then I found that their website was [...]