The last post in this series won’t focus on a particular app, but instead will be a review of sorts of the things we’ve learned throughout from the examples provided previously. While no examples of bad app design were presented here, it’s not hard to find them and with little exception all of these apps take their cues from Apple’s own apps and UI guidelines when it comes to creating a useful, successful app.

When it comes to navigation, having that bottom “dock” of icons for your most important bits seems to be the most successful way to offer access to features. Another thing used sometimes, but not seen in this series is a “home page,” showing full screen all the navigation bits. The Facebook app exemplifies this best. When navigating from one section to another, however, the top back and forwards arrow buttons provide the most usefulness. The iPod app offers the best example of this with its multi-colored “Now Playing” button constantly leading back to what you’re doing right now, which is listening to music, and a separate back button appearing when you drill down from the artists or albums view to the songs view.

The Mint.com app shows what’s possible with some creative icon editing, and letting iOS do some of the work for you, as well as showcasing design evolution. For the time being, you can still see the old app design at the iTunes Preview link above and can compare it to the screenshot provided earlier in this series.

The Groceries app shows us that doing a seemingly simple thing, which an iOS device is almost overkill for, and doing it well is a recipe for serious success. Beautiful icons, subtle touches to tie the app into its real-world model, but offering greater organization and ease of use than even pen and paper.

Square demonstrates that while simple, clear app design is crucial, having a physical accessory can sometimes be the killer app, especially when its something as eminently useful as a credit card reader that anyone can apply for and obtain. Their underwriting difficulties notwithstanding, all of their users have raved about Square and bright things are on the horizon for this and other portable payment gateways.

Finally, Tapbot’s Weightbot, Pastebot, Calcbot and Convertbot apps show that having a guiding theme throughout all your apps, and really creating a global brand for your products can inject some true personality into them, giving them almost a life of their own.

We’re going to get a little bit “meta” in this post, and discuss WordPress for iOS. “Meta” because this is a post on a WordPress-powered blog. WordPress being the powerful platform for communication that it is, Automattic decided to craft an iPhone app (and later develop it into a universal iPhone+iPad app) that gave access to the most necessary features for a WordPress site: editing posts, pages and comments.

As you can see, the main interface has three buttons, and while they are similar to the typical outline-style Apple espouses, they are actually modified versions of the icons you see within the WordPress admin interface, accompanying the top-level navigation elements there. This is quite an excellent tie-in to the main, web-based software. But let’s back up a bit. The setup screen for a WP-powered site attempts to be as simple as possible, only offering a single screen’s worth of options and only really requiring that you answer three questions: your blog URL, username and password. From there, the app can almost always connect; only in rare instances does it have difficulty and ask you for a direct link to the xmlrpc.php file that allows for this sort of remote access.

While you’re in the setup, however, you can make some changes to how many “recent items” are displayed when viewing this site’s items, whether or not geotagging is enabled and whether or not photos are resized to make posting times faster. HTTP authentication is an advanced feature, allowing you to hide your site behind basic authentication, and the WordPress app wants to ensure you can edit these sites as well.

Now that we’ve added our site, we can see our comments, posts and pages, and make a new post or page if we so desire. The comments list shows avatars and can be filtered for pending comments if you have WP’s review features for comments enabled. You can even delete whole swathes of comments if you like by tapping the edit button in the top right. Tapping a comment itself allows you to unapprove it or edit it.

The posts and pages lists are identical in all but what sort of item you’re editing, and as they’re identical in many ways as far as WordPress is concerned, this makes sense. You have access to all the usual fields (title, tags, categories, publish status), and can write plain text or HTML in the content area. There’s currently no way to do any rich text editing without HTML knowledge, but this remains one of the few limitations to content entry. They did make one particularly interesting design choice. When viewing the entry initially, the metadata remains as a header and the content scrolls in the lower half of the screen. Tapping the content, however, enlarges it to full screen, allowing for much easier editing of content.

Along the bottom, the navigation has shifted to offer control of the entry in questions, comments, photos and other settings (such as publish date, for scheduling or pre-dating items), and even the ability to preview the post as it would appear on your blog. The preview features depends on your theme’s compatibility, and occasionally does not work as expected, but it falls back to a basic preview to give you at least some idea of what you’ve created.

All in all, an excellent mobile blogging / editing app for the WordPress software. Best of all, like WordPress itself, it’s free. Enjoy!