It’s great to see my friend Jeff Beard join the blogosphere at LawTechGuru. And in his first week he’s already given me a great tip — Azure. It’s a Palm app that allows you to connect to your weblog app (like Movable Type”, which is what I use).
In fact, I was all set to post this to my blog from my Treo when I discovered a major shortcoming in Azure: that if you get an incoming phone call, Treo jumps to answer the phone call. And Azure goes away… the next time you launch the app it starts you at the beginning… and after you’ve spent 10 minutes laboriously typing in raw HTML on the tiny Treo keyboard and lose it, you get a bit annoyed. That’s not necessarily Azure’s fault (after all, it’s the Treo that decides to give the phone call priority), but it’s a pretty big shortcoming in my book.
Nevertheless, I really appreciate the pointer, Jeff. It’s now on my Treo and I expect it will come in handy if I ever want to add to my blog when I’m not in front of my PC.
I’m looking forward to Jeff’s continued contributions.
One response to “Welcome to LawTech Guru Jeff Beard”
Rick, thanks for the warm welcome into the blogosphere. It's been a lot of fun so far, and I'm just warming up. ;^)Here's a few things that should help you and others with Azure:Azure doesn't store the draft post on the PDA. I encountered a similar problem when I inadvertently tapped on the “Back” button a few times too many. When I retraced my steps forward again in Azure, the entry was gone.This is briefly documented on Azure's web site under “Known problems” — “Posts not saved locally. If you go back to the recent post list when editing an existing or new post, the changes you have made will be lost.”So I recommend saving it to your MT blog frequently as a draft post while you're entering it. There's another tip in the “Known problems” section about how to change MT's default configuration from “always publish” to draft. I haven't tried this yet, but if it works, you could then re-download the draft in Azure to continue editing after an intervening phone call. If you can remotely change the “post status” back to publish, this might work.It's by no means perfect, but for free and a 0.4 beta version, it's the best I've found so far on the Palm platform. And thanks for the great tip about the intervening phone call issue. All part of pushing the envelope, which you do so well.