By Bill Mann
I guess I'm getting lazy. I've got an excellent digital camera, but I can never bring myself to carry the thing, preferring instead to snap pictures on the fly with my Treo 650. The pictures may be grainy if I print them, but they look fine online. The trick is getting the pictures online quickly in a form that people can easily view. Enter SplashBlog, an easy-to-use photoblogging application for smartphones and other wireless devices. With SplashBlog on my phone, and my account at SplashBlog.com, I can shoot, caption, and post pictures almost instantly from anywhere I have a connection.
First-time success without stress
My first experience with SplashBlog was photoblogging my cousin's wedding. It was really simple. Start SplashBlog. Select Camera. Snap picture. Select Save. Wait a few seconds for the SplashBlog Edit dialog box to appear so I can add a title and caption, tweak the date and time, or delete the picture if I don't like it. Either select OK to save the photo and text, or Sync to wirelessly synchronize the new entry with the wedding photoblog I set up on http://www.splashblog.com. Repeat until done.
Then all I had to do was send the bride and groom an email with the link to the photoblog on the Web. Mission accomplished. Hearing how good the photos looked and how nice it was to see pictures so soon after the wedding only added icing to the cake. That's when I decided I really liked SplashBlog and should probably stop winging it and actually look at the manual for the first time.
SplashBlog on your mobile device
SplashBlog is the application you load onto your wireless device to capture, caption, and upload images to the photoblog. As shown in Figure A, the SplashBlog interface is clean and easy to work with.
FIGURE A
SplashBlog's uncluttered interface makes it easy to photoblog while on the move. (click for larger image)
The figure shows my handheld subscribed to a single blog (go to http://www.splashblog.com/apartmentviews to see the actual blog) that I created for this review. From this screen you can create a new blog, edit an existing one, synchronize your wireless device with the blog, and subscribe to additional SplashBlogs, if you know their URL and the blog you want to connect to is set up for public access.
