Plurkdev

For a few months now we’ve been waiting for the two Plurk iPhone Apps.  The first one is, I believe, created by Ryan Lim owner of Plurk Karma Trend and the creator of the first unofficial Plurk API (Ryan, please CMIIW).  The second iPhone App is called iPlurk (what a surprise!).  I am not sure who’s making this one, there is no link to the developer’s website, or an About page in the website.  It does say though that the copyright belongs to AjaxLife Development, but there is no link or explanation of who they are.

Surprisingly, even though Ryan’s app was submitted to AppStore on September 2008, much earlier than iPlurk which was submitted around January 2009, iPlurk seems to be hitting AppStore first.  I emailed Ryan, asking about this earlier, let’s see what’s his opinion on this matter.

Anyway, as you’ve probably guessed, I was pretty excited when I heard that iPlurk was up on AppStore, I opened my AppStore, searched iPlurk, and there it was.  But imagine my horror when I saw the ‘price tag’ !  You have to fork $1.99 to get this app !  A little bit ’steep’ for this kind of app, considering that other similar apps (Twitter’s for example) are free.

But as I really wanted to try it, I said to myself that it would be a good investment, so I touched the button and bought it.  As usual, iPhone immediately downloaded and installed that app.

And there it was, installed on my iPhone Home Page.  Opening the app, I was greeted with the login page.

Putting in my username and password, I was taken to the main page:

It took a while to load all the new Plurks, though I blamed this more on the lack of Plurk Official API, rather than the app itself.
There is nothing special on the look and feel of the User Interface in general, it’s just like any other basic iPhone Apps out there.  At the top you can see the Toolbar with 3 buttons, each will give you access to All New Plurks, Unread Plurks, and Private Plurks.  Another button on the top-right corner is for opening the Write New Plurk page.  No Refresh button though.  It turned out that the refresh is automatic, which is not a bad thing, again, considering that we still don’t have a proper Plurk API yet, we really don’t want to give the Plurk folks a heart-attack.  Luckily, you can change the poll-interval via the iPlurk Setting.

The Plurk Timeline, some of you might feel relieved, is a Horizontal scrolling one Each row shows the user’s avatar, the message, and depending on your setting, it will show you an embedded emoticons.  Your shared picture or video will just be showed as link.  It will also have the date and time when the Plurk was created, how many responses it has and how many of these responses are unread.
Tapping on a Plurk will take you to the Response page where you can read all responses for that particular Plurk.

On top right corner of this Plurk Responses page, you can find the Reply button.  Tapping this button will open the Reply Page:

Tapping on the ‘>’ will give you the list of Qualifiers (all in English at the moment).

While tapping on the ‘empty field’ below the username will give you the usual virtual keyboard for you to write.
You can see also that there is an Upload Photo button, this will allow you to Plurk your photo, either directly from your iPhone camera, or from the list on your Photo Roll.

Here is an example when I tried to upload my photo when I was creating a new Plurk (same interface as replying):

It seems that iPlurk uses proprietary service to shorten the url (I am not sure where the file itself is uploaded to). Tapping on the send button brought me back to the main page where I could see the Plurk I had just created with the link to the photo I uploaded.  Only when I went to the Responses page that I could see the photo embedded.

Speaking about links, you can tap on any link and the url will be loaded in the so-called in-built browser.  If you’ve been playing around with other iPhone app that has similar functionality, you would understand what this is.  Basically it’s like a toned down Safari Browser, without the url bar.

If the in-built browser is not enough for you, you can always invoke the ‘real’ Safari by tapping on that button with bulls-eye icon.

Back on the main page, if you tap on the Unread button, you will be taken to the page where you can view your unread plurks, and just like the web counterpart, you can Mark All as Read by tapping on the button on the top right hand corner and choose Mark All As Read button from the slide up pane.

Another functionality that quite useful is, when you tap on the Avatar icon, iPlurk will show you Plurks from that User:

Annoyingly, you can’t tap on your own avatar to get your own Plurks ! WTH !

Finally, you can set some settings:

The Verdict

This version of iPlurk, for me, is ‘functional’ at best.  Sure, it has all the basic functionalities, i.e. Showing Timeline, Responses, Replying, Creating New Plurk with Qualifier, and even uploading Photo.  Let say, it’s a little bit less tedious than Plurk Mobile.  But with some other ‘crucial’ functionalities are still missing, namely the ability to see your ‘own’ plurks and plurks you’ve been responded to, as well as private plurking and multi-languange qualifiers, I just can not justify the 2 bucks I had to pay for it.

My advise, give it a try only if you really … really desperate or if you have absolutely had enough with Plurk Mobile :)  But other than that, I would stick with Plurk mobile for a while longer, or better still, create a better one.

Now, Plurk Team, can we please have that API please !?

Keep Plurking !