Bhutanese Bloggers App- Coming soon

On 24 June 2015 we saw the union of 35 Bhutanese bloggers in Thimphu. 35 is by far the biggest number we had so far. This time almost every blogger in Thimphu managed to come, with little icing on the top from Wangdue and Paro. A friend of Bhutanese bloggers from Singapore, Rima has also made it to the gathering.

We ran out of space in this room...

During this Blogger Meet we made some serious decisions with guidance from Dasho Sangay Khandu and Au Yeshey Dorji; first we decided to call ourselves the Community of Bhutanese Bloggers and we agreed to meet at least twice a year. With optimism given by the overwhelming attendance we felt the need to look for better settings hereafter and to sustain the community we decided on membership fee. An elected working group is now working on a document that will guide our events.

The community made it clear that we may support each other but will never influence or interfere with anyone's freedom of expression, and that goes on to say that individual bloggers are solely responsible for what they write and how they write, even after having the community. It's little early to say but I see ourselves organising inspirational workshops to empower bloggers. We even saw possibilities of organising Bloggers awards.

Personally, my favourite outcome of the meet would be the idea of creating a smartphone app I randomly shared, which I am not sure if other endorsed but nonetheless I will work on this and when it's done I am sure the community will love it.

The App is going to be something like BHUTANews that collates feeds from all news sites. Our app will collate feeds of our members' blogs so that every blogger gets equal readership. The app can have features to analyse blogs through readership and interaction to come up with nominations for possible blogger awards. I'm going to talk to the maker of BHUTANews, who is a very good friend of mine. Let me find out what it would take to have such an app.

By the time we settled for this photo session, 12 friends have left...

I want to thank my co-organizers Nawang Phuntsho, Riku Dhan Subba and Rekha Mongar for making it possible. For the cosy venue and refreshment We would like to thank our friend Tharchen, CEO of iBest. And for the dinner, we would like to thank Wangyel Tshering for your generous donation and Ma'am Tshering Dollar for offering to add on it.

We missed so many bloggers who weren't in Thimphu on the day. We would like you to know that the community would love to have your presence in the future meets. There is no criteria, no formality and no restriction of any sort. No one is a stranger in the community.

Made in Bhutan Apps (BHUTANews)

It's so shameful to discover that Bhutan couldn't produce one person capable of programming a simple computer software that we could proudly talk about in the world. Forget about a full scale software we haven't developed a mobile phone application so far. Somewhere I read that an 11 year old has developed an application for iPhone. I personally have lots of guilt because I entered computer lab back in 1999 and ever since I have been in touch with computer but still today I am dealing with Microsoft Office. I was never prepared for that. Exam was our only concern.

But wait, what have we here? An Android App made in Bhutan! The makers of Sherig Collection has pioneered an android app called BHUTANews. It's the first of its kind in the country and perhaps the alarm clock to us all. The app, which for now is available only on android devices, is capable of giving up-to-date news compiled from Bhutan's major newspapers, magazines and blogs. It's a one stop shop for news in Bhutan, and if you don't want to miss anything you should get it. It's free! Apple device users should have to wait.

Download it for free!
Like their Facebook Page to Ask Questions and Post Feedback

While I and my generation failed to make any significant impact on Bhutan's IT history, I have great hope in some of my students. They will do what I couldn't and when that day comes you will read about it here on this blog. You already read how much they have done during the School Club Exhibition.

Also some massive changes are coming the IT education in Bhutan, which has the potential to produce first generation of Computer programmers in Bhutan. I will write about this later. For now you download the app.

iPad Apps for Bloggers

An iPad was all I had in my dream for years and to achieve it I had considered selling one of my kidneys (not to be taken seriously, just a figure of speech). Thank god my sister in-law knew it before I really went crazy over the idea. She asked her brother working at Apple to gift me an iPad 2 during my birthday last year. I was sleepless for nights before I received the package and nights after I got my hand on it. After a week I thanked god I spared my kidney; there was nothing much I could do with it.
With free Apps I was limited to using trial apps, childish games, and frustration was building on. It gave birth to a new dream of owning a credit card so that I could buy Apps from Apps Store. I didn't mind my daughter using it roughly anymore.
It was only after I knew about Cydia, thanks to my friend and Apple Jack Tshering Tenzin, that I fell back in love with my iPad. I suddenly started worshiping my device after it was Jailbroken. Thanks to hackers, we get access to paid apps without paying. It became my teaching tool, Classroom organizer, text book, rough book, my music guru, Karoke, DJ set, my Playstation, and of all the best things it became my blogging tool.
I double rejoiced the discovery of the blogging apps because for months I was looking for them, and on many occasions I wrote to Blogger and Google to come up with Blogger Apps- as if they would listen. They only had Blogger App which was meant for iPhones. Though compatible with iPad the resolution was not welcoming.

Blogger – FREE: The Blogger app helps you publish posts to your Google Blogger blog. You can use the app with more than one Blogger account, and add location information and images to your posts. Pictures can come from the app itself, or straight from your iPad photo gallery, and you can use the post list to view or edit previous posts or drafts.

After the Jailbreak I got the following two apps for free and what more is happiness for a man who loves blogging on the go.

Blogsy – $4.99

Blogsy is designed to make blogging on the iPad easy. It supports multiple blog platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, TypePad, Joomla and Drupal, and also supports content from YouTube, Flickr and Picasa. The app enables you to create and edit posts, add media content, publish to your network, and create rich-text emails. It’s drag-and-drop methods make adding images and hyperlinks to posts much simpler than it is even on a desktop. There’s very little you can’t do using this app, the only restriction is that you can only use it with existing blog accounts.

BlogPress – $4.99

Similar to Blogsy, BlogPress supports multiple blogging platforms, and gives you a range of features to use. The app supports text, image, video and audio content from the likes of YouTube, Flickr and Picasa, and you can format posts using the app’s comprehensive layout editor. Integrated with Facebook and Twitter, BlogPress also helps you manage your social sharing, enabling you to tweet or post to followers and fans when you have published new content.

Lucky for WordPress and Tumblr users, they always had the best best apps for free:

Tumblr – FREEThe Tumblr app comes with a range of features. As well as being able to write and publish posts, add images, and other basic functions, you can schedule posts for a certain time, create customized tweets to alert followers to new material, and manage more than one Tumblr blog at a time. The content editor allows you to publish text, audio, video, quotes, images and links, so the content you’re posting doesn’t have to be restricted by the fact you’re using an iPad. You can also view and reply to Tumblr messages, and see which of your iPad contacts also uses the blogging platform.

WordPress – FREEThe WordPress app works with iPhone and iPad and enables you to manage your WordPress blog. As well as create, format and publishing posts and pages, you can also add images and videos to your work, moderate comments and view blog stats. With a content editor that has many of the basic features the desktop version of WordPress carries, you can create professional-looking blog content on the go.

 

Courtesy: Picture along with the whole Apps Information are retrieved from ZeroPaid.com with thanks.