Risk's thoughts, babblings and ideas
A small blog of a complete idiot, with too much free time
So, yesterday I found about the Tumblr app on the App store, and was immedietly suckered in, but as some of you, who’ve read my previoust blog entries, know it turned out to be very badly designed. I’ve done some research on the subject to find alternatives and actually came across two more Tumblr 3rd party clients that I’m willing to talk about in the upcoming entries and possibly comapre them with the first one I tried and between each other. I’m going to talk about each one in the seperate entries in greater detail. I’m not going to review the official version, because it’s THE official version and it’s probably the one you’re going to check out first if you want to get a Tumblr client on you iPhone/iPod. I want to focus more on the alternatives. So here it is.
The first altarnate client is called tumblr gear, produced by Hiroyuki Onishi, and is curently free. I’ll be reviewing version 1.6.0 of this app, and so far things are looking good. The first time I entered it it showed this options screen.
As you see, aside from the general login data, it has some other features, useful for a device that has a small processor like the iPod. “Initial Load Pages”, the “Auto Page Duration” and the “Quick Reblog & Like” option I’ll get to in a sec, so to keep things tidied up, I’m sorry if it gets a little confusing, but you’ll figure it out, I mean you already chose Tumblr to Twitter, which means you are smart. “Auto Refresh Posts” is a very good thing to turn on at all times. Basicly if your device crashes or the internet connection is cut off, the app loads up the last post/page/blog etc. you were last looking at, so you can continue from the place you ended. And the last options speaks for itself.
Moving on. This is how the dashboard looks.
As you can see it looks nothing like the desktop version, but in the case of the iPod it’s a good thing. What you’re currently looking at is a “page”. You see, the developer cut the dashboard into seperate entries and the device loads them seperatly, rather than the whole thing, so you get better speed and browse faster. The “Preference” button brings you back to the options menu, and when you click on the “Menu” button it gives you the option to reload the dashboard, pin a certain page and come back to it later, or move to last post you visited. The “Play” button starts a slideshow of the pages, and you actually control the speed of which it changes it from the “Auto Paging Duration” option. And the two little arrows on in the lower right edge of the screen let you scroll between pages. This is where the “Initial Load Pages” comes into play. With it you choose how many pages the device to load up in advance. If you have a weak internet connection you can lower the number of pages to get faster single loadings.
“Quick Reblog & Like” toggles the two “buttons” next to the little arrows, which allow you to quickly do those actions. The thing that I like about this setup is that it’s all designed to give you the fastest and smoothest browsing experience, so you can quickly reblog/like/reply etc., which is very important for a portable device, because the battery life is usually very short when connected to the web.
And now if you want to make quick posts there is a little inconveniance with it. Because the dashboard isn’t in the traditional style, it’s optimised only for viewing and the posting options are not there. So if you want to post, you first have to click on someone’s username to bring up their blog, or yours it doesn’t matter. 
This is how it looks, and it is pretty standart. It basicly looks like the desktop version. And you can get to the desktop verion of the dashboard itself and the site in general. If you want you can tap “Safari” to open the whole thing with the browser, but if don’t want to use it, you can still stay in the app. 
So this concludes my review of tumblr gear. I like it more than the official version, because of it’s more user-friendly interface and the focus on browsing, which is what you’ll want to do on a portable device. Stay tuned for part 3 when I’ll try to review TheTumbler, another alternative client. Cheers.
*** All rights for tumblr gear are owned by Hiroyuki Onishi. I do not claim any of them.
