Countdown to EmbinkThe first release of Embink is fast approaching, as I’m working out just a few more minor bugs that have popped up while testing compatibility on Windows Mobile 5 machines, and I can’t wait to see what feedback I get from the online community. Although I haven’t been able to work on the project quite as much as I wanted to, I do have many of the basic features written in preliminary form and they’ve worked pretty well on my development and test websites. Before too long, I’ll be using Embink exclusively to post articles online.

Once this happens, it should be no problem to keep up with a daily release schedule :P
That said, I’ll need to ensure the image management is done a whole lot better than it is now.

Here’s a list of functions that exist in the alpha release:

  • writing and editing of both pages and posts
  • spell check (using any dictionary found on system)
  • auto-save every X minutes
  • support for FireStats
  • support for All-in-One SEO Plugin (version 1.3.x — I’ll start discussing the future of this with the new developer in the next few months)
  • support for comments (edit, approve, decline, mark as spam)
  • local copy of posts and pages (user editable — last 10, last X days, all)
  • VGA and QVGA support
  • support for Windows Mobile 5, 6 and 2002
  • requires less than 300 KB of storage for the application (my install has a copy of all 607 posts and 20 pages found on this site, which means the internal database is sitting at 4 MB — including thumbnailed images)
  • and, naturally, the ability to post to WordPress blogs running version 2.1 or higher (may work with lower versions, though)

It’s not a very long list, and I wish it could be long for the alpha release … but this should give me a pretty good indication of both what does and does not work out there, as well as whether people are happy with the interface. So far, I know there will be at least five people testing the alpha, but I’ll welcome anyone who wants to try it.

One of my next challenges will be to create a sexy logo for this program. Perhaps I’ll find a cute animal and make that part of the logo….

What functions or features do you want to see in a mobile blogging application?