aTumble (tumblr app for Android) 1.6.8 review
A while ago I posted a tiny “review” of aTumble, a small tumblr app for Android. Since then the author has added or changed some features, and I think it’s time for a review of the changes and a more expansive review of the application. I haven’t used it in a while so I don’t remember everything that has changed. Still, here goes.
aTumble is a small ($0.99) application for the mobile Android OS that attempts to make viewing and posting to Tumblr easier. Its featurebase is small, but that should be no problem if the features are well-polished. Currently, you can view the dashboard, your own Tumblr posts, and write/delete posts. These things are not polished, and I will detail the problems and good things in the list below. I hope it’ll come in useful to the author or someone else. Do note that for $0.99 this isn’t that bad of an app.
- The dashboard function is nice but slow. After a brief but puzzling ‘rendering…’ message, it shows about 10 of the latest dashboard posts in a nice layout which does leave me wondering what’s wrong with the speedier layout technique used in the “My Tumblr” screen. Loading more posts takes quite long or does not work at all. Too much eyecandy, too little speed and functionality.
- aTumblr 1.6.8 has added like and reblog functionality in the dashboard. The ‘like’ functionality is inline and pretty nice, as is the dashboard post expansion after a hold-click (the delay could be shorter or it could indicate something could happen and it should expand if you click on the ‘x notes’ link). The reblog feature is less polished, it just sends you to a login form at tumblr.com.
- Good changes since last time: the new post layout has been fixed on cupcake and there’s nice multiple tumblelogs support.
- Still no post editing, while that seems to be the most important missing feature (more important than ‘liking’, I presume) and the most requested one.
- If one starts writing a post, but changes from the post window to another part of the app, the post is ‘forgotten’, without a warning message. One of the nice things about Android is that mostly every app remembers state. Anyone used to this could easily lose their work.
- When you use the application for the first time you get (smartly) presented with the settings screen. However, once the necessary login details are entered, there’s no indication for what the user should do. it looks like an intro screen, but the user should press back to get into the main app. This is unintuitive.
- Android integration has improved. When trying to share a page in the Browser, aTumble is one of the options, nice (could it be possible to use the Title as link name?). Same for the Youtube sharing option, though only as link. There’s still some lack of integration: for example, there’s no sharing option after having taken a picture.
- Nitpick: unlike in about 99% of the input forms in Android there’s no auto-capitalisation.
The website of the application states: “aTumble is an Android application that allows you to quickly an easily post to your Tumblr account (sic)”. If that’s the core function - it does just that, indeed, and that’s fine. If it wants to be more, it’s going to need some polish.
Feel free to contact me if I’ve got anything wrong.