Posts tagged tumblr

Tumblr (iPhone App) — Tumblr, Inc.

A year and a half ago I reviewed version 1.0 of the official iPhone app for Tumblr, the popular microblogging (and hipster culture coverage) platform. In the interim, as the social media site continued to gain an astonishment of new users, the app underwent a few minor changes that necessitated increments in the minor numbers of the app’s version. But just recently the app was redesigned seemingly from the ground up, thereby finally promoting its version to 2.0.

What’s new in this brand new version? Practically everything. The most prominent change is, of course, the interface. Tumblr apparently used the interface of the Instagram iPhone app as a template: as in the Instagram app, there’s a bottom bar in the Tumblr app populated by five buttons, the middle button being slightly bigger and similar to Instagram’s Share button. That button is labeled here as Post, and it opens a selection grid of post types: text, photo, link, quote, audio, and video. Most posting options found in Tumblr’s full site post editor—among these are options to publish a post immediately or save it for later and fields in which to specify tags and URL slugs—can also be found here by swiping to the left while you’re on the post editor page.

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Paranoid Android
El Ten Eleven
These Promises Are Being Videotaped (2008) 

I was away from this blog for well over a month, during which time I was busy rerouting lines and surface patterns on printed circuit boards that end up in Brazilian motorists’ dashboards, reviewing and beta-testing iPhone apps to supplement my scant income, contributing to a kick-ass film blog, and having virtually no life outside the little circle at the center of which is me and my trusty computer.

I’m well aware that I need to do something with that last bit if I still possess at least an iota of concern over my mental and emotional health (I’m glad to report that I do.) but, alas, I can’t fully commit to such a potentially arduous undertaking at the moment. For now I shall be content with doing something that is far less demanding but is, in my mind, no less rewarding: restoring this godforsaken blog to its former glory, if any.

Prior to publishing my first blog post in ages, I thought a theme overhaul was in order. So I had my ambitious, on-its-way-to-recovery blog go under the respective knives of Web interface surgeons Jonathan Moore and Matthew Buchanan, whose superb Solaris theme I ended up using.

Also, I thought a change of blog title was called for. I initially opted for Paranoid Android, which is a reference to Marvin, the sarcastically fluent and pessimistically disposed robot in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and incidentally is in keeping with the blog’s previous title, Dreams of Electric Sheep, but seeing that paranoidandroid both as a Tumblr username and a top-level domain name was already taken, I had to think of something else.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to think and look any further than my bedside table, where several books I wanted to be always within reach were stacked. There, between The Elements of Style and The Catcher in the Rye, was The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns that he used to write for The Believer. Seeing that thepolysyllabicspree both as a Tumblr username and a top-level domain name was available and because I am admittedly given to both bibliophilia and sesquipedalianism, this blog was reborn thus: The Polysyllabic Spree.

I sure hope I get to post as often and write as many syllables as I’d like this time around or all that theme exclusivity and domain name forwarding will be all for nothing.

My next self-assignment: Step outside the circle, cease being paranoid, and get a life.