Blurb app creates multimedia stories on iPhone

The delivery mechanism is clunky and somewhat pointless. Solutions like posterous or tumblr offer a better way to tell stories, in my opinion.

I've published a few books through Blurb. They're good folks. But I'm having trouble seeing the point of this app. I'll set aside the fact that as others have noted, the results are currently clunky and buggy--we'll assume that Blurb will fix that. But even if it worked right, it seems both needlessly complex and needlessly limited.

Let me propose an alternative: Posterous. Send an email to post@posterous.com, and it gets posted to your blog. Attach a picture, and that gets included. Attach multiple pictures, and Posterous automatically creates a photo gallery (yes, it does slideshows). You can include graphics, audio, video... Posterous will gracefully handle pretty much anything you throw at it. And by the way, any slideshows, video, and audio you put in your blog posts will work fine on iOS devices--no Flash compatibility problems.

There's a lot more--for example Posterous can take your email and cross-post to an existing Blogger, Tumblr, or WordPress blog--but the main point is that you don't need a special app to tell your story. Just email any text you like, with any attachments you like. It doesn't get any easier than that.

No, I don't work for Posterous. I just think they have an elegantly simple solution that works very well for a lot of things. By comparison, I see the Blurb app as needlessly complicated, not to mention buggy.

I always like to take candid photographs. Sometimes they can tell stories by themselves. But, most of the times, you want to stitch multiple of them to make the stories even better. Or maybe, add a short video clip highlighting certain unforgettable moments. Well now we have a new iPhone app that would help us doing so.
I've posted a quick review with a lot of screenshots here: http://bit.ly/lJHMiC
I think Blurb worths checking out. I'm already a fan!

I saw this app, thanks for the review. Good to know it is easy and solid but the results for the viewers are less than stellar don't you think? The scolling between slides was sluggish and the video didn't play.

I viewed on an iphone4 in safari.

I tried the test slideshow from my iPad1. The slide effect was very clunky and the video wouldn't play at all. Anyone else have the same problem?