Zapd iPhone App Review
Zapd - What does it do?
Zapd is a nice mobile app that lets you publish your photos, your thoughts or share links on the web via a cool-looking website with a unique hosted domain name of your own. And that’s for free, just like getting the app from the iTunes App Store. You won’t even have to create an account. Just get the app running on your iPhone and start typing your thoughts, posting photos you’ve taken using your iPhone, or share a link you stumbled upon while browsing the web. Somehow it works like Tumblr minus the prerequisite of creating a Tumblr account. Zapd also lets you share your website with your friends via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail while you’re inside the app.
Features and Functionality (4 out of 5)
The app lets you create as many websites as you want for free. You can peruse several pre-loaded themes or skins that you can apply on your website. These themes will change your website’s background color, fonts and layout. Once you are settled with the theme that you will use, you can start taking photos right away and publish them on your website. Before publishing, the app will give you the chance to add a caption as well as some descriptive text. You can also use existing photos on your iPhone’s camera roll. Once you’re done with these details, simply click the “publish button” and the app will start processing your post. Once it’s done, the app will give you the URL of your website if you want to view it on your desktop browser or you can simply check it out on your iPhone which will use the mobile Safari browser to display your just published website.
The next time you want to make an entry, you’ll have the option to build another site by using another theme. If you use the same theme as before, the new post will be added to your existing posts and will yield its URL once the app has processed your post. If you use another theme, you will be give a new URL which will contain your post.
Another nice feature of the app is that it lets you link to other websites on your Zapd website. You can also reorder any of your website’s elements before publishing your posts.
Sharing your website with your friends is done via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail. And you can do this while inside the app. No need to copy and paste the URL of your website to a new e-mail message to send it. The app will do this for you.
Our Verdict (4 out of 5)
As it is right now, the Zapd iPhone app is a pretty decent app for creating your own website easily. It has enough features to get you started publishing your photos, thoughts and links via a hosted website. But then of course, there is still more room for improving this app. It would have been great if you could publish your Foursquare check-ins as posts to your website as well. Or if you could directly publish from Facebook or Twitter in your Zapd site.
I’m not really sure if Zapd is planning to become a full-pledge community where users who’ve published a website via the app can share comments and interact within the app. This would certainly be a welcome feature.
Still, the app is awesome. It’s easy to use and will enable you to create a website in a jiffy and we love the app for that.
References
- Pressplane: https://zapd.com
- Image credit: Screenshots provided by the author.
