Have a WordPress blog? Own an iPhone or iPod touch? Have you been using WordPress for iPhone to update your blog from the comfort of your bathroom [insert your own visual image here]?

The WordPress community has been hard at work on the next release of WordPress for iPhone, and it will contain a ton of new features including:

• Landscape mode with the extra wide keyboard
• Link creation help
• Support for editing and creating Pages
• Comment moderation
• Asynchronous publishing
• Photo resizing options

A video of WordPress for iPhone 1.2 in action with a beta of WordPress 2.7 is available with a quick click on the video window at the top of this post. For more information, visit the WordPress for iPhone page.

As with the previous versions, WordPress for iPhone 1.2 will be free. As soon as the beta test is complete and all bugs have been successfully squashed, the new version will be available via the App Store.

Erik Schwiebert is one of the lead developers on the Mac Business Unit team under the Microsoft banner. I find their position constantly interesting -- even in these enlightened days of Safari for Windows, many dyed-in-the-wool Mac users still consider Microsoft the enemy, and yet the Mac BU has always been like a kind of diplomatic envoy. We have to use things like Office and Entourage, so we cautiously let them across the border, regarding them like strange visitors from the other side of the wall.

But maybe that's just all in my mind. Recently, the Mac BU released an update for Office 2008, and lots of users, apparently, have suffered from error problems while trying to install it. So many, in fact, that Schwiebert has responded to the problems on his blog, saying that the problems are most likely because users have deleted or otherwise messed with files inside the installation, causing the installer to abort. And that strange Mac BU/Mac users fragile truce comes into play here as well -- he specifically calls out Xslimmer and Monolingual, two programs that delete often-unnecessary files in OS X, for causing the issues.

There's a workaround floating around, but Schwiebert warns it leaves the application suite in a possibly unstable and unsupportable state. Unfortunately, Schwiebert doesn't really offer any solutions (other, we guess, than to reinstall the software so that it's back to the full install, and then apply the update). And the alliance between the Mac BU and their users remains fragile -- we've got to work together, but it seems that many are unhappy about it.

Just a little while ago I wrote about Typepad's native iPhone app, which I quite liked. Many folks thought it looked neat, but they were either running their own WordPress blogs, or using Wordpress.com's hosted service neither of which are compatible with the Typepad app (for obvious reasons). Luckily for them, the good folks at WordPress have posted some information about the forthcoming WordPress iPhone application.

The app is ready, and pending addition to the App Store. It will work with both self hosted WordPress installs and blogs hosted on WordPress.com. You can do all the things you would expect: upload pictures, write blog posts, and edit existing posts.

The app should be available soon on the App Store for free. Once it is available I'll be taking it for a spin and posting my thoughts.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

I've been blogging for way too long, and for a good chunk of that time my personal blog has been hosted on Six Apart's TypePad. I'm a big fan of the service (though some might recall it was a little flakey in the early days, I'm happy to report I can recall no major downtime in the last 2 years) and that's why I was very excited to see TypePad was coming out with an iPhone native blogging app.

Typepad Mobile, as it is called within the program itself, is available now on the App Store for the low, low price of free (of course, Typepad isn't a free service). It is a blogging client that lets you post directly to your TypePad blog from your iPhone as you might have guessed from the name. You can also snap a picture with your iPhone's camera and post that to your blog, or you can post a photo from your iPhone's photo roll in just a few clicks.

During the course of my testing this app was very zippy, and it did everything I would expect from a 1.0 release. I hope to see some more blog management features in future updates (being able to approve/delete comments would be very cool).

Check out this gallery for a a quick tour of this neat little app.

Attention all bloggers! The nerd bunnies at Brainjuice have just released Blogo 1.1, the latest take on their Mac OS X blogging tool. Blogo 1.1 now includes support for Drupal and Twitter in addition to WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, typo, and MovableType.

The new Twitter support allows users to post tweets and direct messages from Blogo, and can even send a tweet whenever you post. Brainjuice has fixed some existing issues, as well as adding these new features:

• Support for raw image formats
• Integration with NetNewsWire and Safari
• Use of Growl for all user notifications
• New text formatting options (quotes, lists, aligned, justified)
• Custom cropping of thumbnails independently of the full-size images

To give Blogo 1.1 a try, download a 21-day unlimited trial or purchase the app for $25.

Hello everyone! My name is Robert Palmer, and I'd like to first thank you in advance for letting me blog for you here at TUAW. I've been using a Mac since 1992, and have owned five Macs since. By day, I'm a web developer, specializing in clean, honest, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. By night, I am asleep.

Here's me a dozen years ago, photographed with my high school girlfriend.*

Up until I started working for myself last November, I was the de-facto IT guy for a 15-workstation Mac network in a graphic design studio environment. I plan to cover plenty of ground for you at the crossroads of the design and Mac worlds.

Cheers to everyone, and be so kind as to leave your best "Addicted to Love," "Simply Irresistible," or "Looking for Clues" jokes in comments. That's right, get it all out of your system now.

*First commenter to correctly name the model pictured wins at the Internets. Hint: It was photographed in a classroom.

Daniel Jalkut posts that TUAW's favorite blogging app, MarsEdit, has hit version 2.1.3. Mainly a bug fix update, the biggest change is that drafts in WordPress and Blogger are now better handled -- their "draft" status is apparently better preserved.

Additionally, a few markup elements, specifically "#tags#" and "#askurl#" have been tweaked to work better, and there is also improved handling of URLs in localhost-based blogs.

MarsEdit is available, as always, for $29.95 from Red Sweater, or free for a 30-day trial period.

Shawn Blanc has wrapped up his series of great software reviews, and now dives into the scariest of waters: those of the major minds in Mac journalism. And he goes first after the biggest shark in the ocean (or at least the one with the sharpest teeth), everyone's favorite Daring Fireball, John Gruber.

The interview is first about interviews, and then goes on to cover Gruber's past (he worked with Bare Bones and Joyent before going on to write the blog full time). Gruber also gives out some great tips for writers, from things as practical as setting a goal the night before to guide your workday and always drinking coffee black, to ephemeral tips like how to become a better writer without actually writing anything (save about a dozen books' worth of message boards and blog posts).

Gruber also talks specifically about Daring Fireball, his favorite stuff on the site, and where he wants to take it, and how far. Definitely a great read -- as always, Shawn makes sure to hit on all the important notes and leave no stone unturned, and Gruber reveals lots of insight on what it's like to put his posts and the Linked List together every day.

Even though we can't use a tool like MarsEdit to post here at TUAW, some of us are still big fans of the program and use it when creating content for our other, more personal sites. Like Ecto, another very good tool for this type of content creation, Mars Edit allows you to compose blog entries, complete with text, links, photos or whatever, on your own computer and once finished, post them directly to your blog.

Of course, we're not the only fans of MarsEdit using it to put up content around the internets. Shawn Blanc, writer, Mac guy, drummer, Tae-Qwon-Do blackbelt and enthusiastic Mars Edit user has posted a very in-depth review of the application at his site. Among the program's many virtues, Blanc praises it for having a "perfect preview" of draft content, that it functions very well as a text editor and the "blatant absence of a WYSIWYG feature" which makes him "extremely impressed with how well it serves the writer."

MarsEdit 2 may not be the right choice for your blogging needs, but if you've never considered it before, this review might just make you want to give it a try. It's $29.95 for a new license, and $9.95 for an upgrade from ME1.

Daniel Jalkut announced the release of MarsEdit 2.1, the great blogging client from Red Sweater Software. The big changes involve a nice search features that allows you to easily find drafts and recent posts, a new tag editor (and support for MT tags), a better preview function as well as my favorite: the ability to save drafts to the server. Needless to say there are also a variety of other tweaks and bugfixes, etc. If you're using MarsEdit you'll want to grab the update.

MarsEdit 2.1 is a free update to registered users and $29.95 to purchase. A demo is available.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Time Machine is probably the defining feature in Mac OS X Leopard. It provides a nice, clean interface for you to backup and restore your files; but did you know you can also restore your computer from the Time Machine backup?

When you insert the Leopard install disk and boot off of it you will be presented with a semi-Mac OS X desktop. In the menu bar, select Utilities and then "Restore System from Backup..." Select your backup drive, the date you want to backup from, and then click restore.

James Duncan Davidson has a full guide on his website describing how the process went. He mentions that while it restores all the files, the caches and databases are not restored. This means when you launch programs such as Mail the application will need to recreate the database, which may take some time.

With just over a week to go until the Steve Jobs January Riot Macworld Keynote and mockups of desired Apple products flying at us, Ars Technica's John Siracusa has posted his definitive Macworld Keynote Bingo card. Complete with that immortal Jobs-ian catch-phrase "Boom" and "a few squares for the phone weenies," it's everything you need for the keynote guessing-game.

Be sure to check out the rules and regulations to see what will tick off each square -- we'd hate for any keynote attendees to jump up and shout "Bingo!" only to find that their line isn't really valid. That would be embarrassing, wouldn't it?

This one is a little bit of inside (blogging) baseball, but I know a lot of our readers blog themselves and so might find this tip handy. Ankur Kothari (whose Quicksilver customizations we've mentioned before) has cooked up an excellent little Quicksilver plugin called IconGrabber that does exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to easily create an image of an application icon at an arbitrary resolution in one of several popular image formats. Using a few simple terminal commands to change the defaults you can select the default image size and format. So, for instance, here at TUAW we post lots of icons at 125px wide in the jpeg format. With IconGrabber I can now create those images in one step as you see above, where I'm saving the Time Machine icon to my TUAW pictures folder. If you're not a Quicksilver fiend, Ankur also has a stand-alone application to do the same thing. In any case, if you regularly need to extract icons as images, IconGrabber is a godsend.

IconGrabber is a free download for either the Quicksilver plugin or the stand-alone application. The instructions for customizing are in the announcement post and the comments below.

I run my personal site using WordPress, and one reason I like using it so much is that (although this is hardly exclusive to WordPress as a content manager) is all the great plugins available for it. On another site I ran under WordPress, I loved using the WP-Print plugin-- it automatically creates a "printable" version of each page on your site. All of the printer compatibility, none of the actual work.

And now, someone's cooked up an iPhone version of that same plugin, where you simply install the WP plugin on your blog (for WordPress 2.2.1), and instantly you can see all your posts formatted specifically for the iPhone. Instead of creating a whole other, "mobile" version of your site, you can simply put in this plugin, and you can get a link that will reformat your content for the iPhone or iPod touch. Very excellent.

If you run a WordPress blog or site and were thinking about creating a version of it for the iPhone or iPod touch, your work is done. Download the iWPhone plugin from Content.Robot, install it, and you're set.

Thanks, Philapple!

I've been blogging for a little over seven years now (I am as shocked as you are, believe me. You would think after all this time I would be better at this!) and many things have changed. Used to be the only way you could write a post for your blog was in a browser window. You would fire up Blogger (or Diaryland, as the case may be) and plunk your entry into a very simple form (no categories, no trackbacks, no Markdown. It was a simpler time, my friends), hit a button and there it would be for all the world to see. That is as long as your browser didn't crash, which tends to happen at the most inopportune times.

Luckily, those dark days are over and we have fantastic apps like MarsEdit to compose our posts in. Oddly enough, MarsEdit 2 was just released by Red Sweater Software (wacky, huh?). Version 2.0 ushers in a completely revamped user interface that follows the UI trends of a mature OS X (the number of floating palettes are sharply down, and the use of drawers is non-existent). This version also brings integration with Flickr, which was one of my biggest requests (thanks, Daniel!). Printing has also been added, because sometimes your posts are so good they should be on paper.

MarsEdit 2 costs $29.95, though if you bought a copy on or after July 1, 2007 the upgrade is free, while it'll cost us long time MarEditers $9.95 to get the snazzy new features. MarsEdit 2 requires OS X 10.4 and there is a free 30 day trial available.