After you download the app and install it, it will open up to the “Home” tab — it looks like this:

“Home” is one of five tabs along the bottom, and this tab is showing you the same content on our home page — www.atu2.com. It’s our Bits & Bytes content. The “Originals” tab will include all of our original articles, columns, essays, interviews, etc. — like OTR, Question of the Month, U2 Lists, and things like Tassoula’s recent interview with Robert Hilburn. The “Blog” tab shows all of our blog posts (what you’re reading now), and the “Forum” tab shows a feed of recent posts in the @U2 Forum. On each of these screens, you can click the icon in the upper right to refresh the screen and check if there’s anything new.

When you click on an article from the Home or Originals tab, you’ll see a screen like this:

This will show a portion of the full article (unless it’s a really short article, which might show in full). If you click the arrow in the upper right, the app will give you three choices: View in Browser, Share on Twitter, Send in Email. Click “View in Browser” to read the full article, or use the other two options to share the article with friends. The “Blog” tab will include the full text of our blog posts.

The left and right arrows in the upper middle of all these tabs lets you go from one article to the next without having to go back to the main tab screen.

The “More” tab is where you’ll find access to our Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts.

And clicking any of those will lead you to our messages, videos, or photos on each site. The YouTube section, for example, looks like this:

From there you can click to watch any of the videos we’ve uploaded.

So that’s a quick guide to what all the tabs and buttons do. We sure hope you iPhone and iPod Touch users like the app and will use it to keep up with all the latest U2 news. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

How to Use @U2′s iPhone App

The changes that affect you are all good — a much cleaner design than we had before, categorization of posts (look in the right column), featured comments from readers (upper right column), RSS feeds for both our posts and your comments, and some other features that will become apparent over time.

One important thing to note: You’ll need to register with atu2blog.com in order to comment. Your old Blogger account won’t work. You can register via the Login link near the end of the right column.

That’s all — welcome, and enjoy!

- Matt

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Welcome to the new @U2 blog!

And by the way, those of you who do live in San Diego have no business also getting the world tour to start there — just living in SD is blessing enough. You lucky, lucky people….

About this blog: It really needs a redesign, doesn’t it? The biggest problem from a functional standpoint is that the left-side column is too thin – look down under “Prior Posts” at how the titles of each post are all jumbled together because they wrap across several lines. I’m thinking we can fix that, change the blog design a bit and still matching the @U2 “brand”.

Opinions, please: Should we change the design here a bit?

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Random blogging notes

@U2 and U2tours.com are both down at the moment. Don’t know why, don’t know when they’ll be back. Both sites sit on the same server (at least until we move @U2 to a separate machine), so that machine must have crashed. All I can do is notify the people who can fix the problem, which I’ve done.

In the meantime, if anything urgent comes up, we still have our little blog.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Site(s) down

And that’s the other reason to start our move toward Blogger — audio posts via a telephone call, posted immediately to the blog.

So there ya go! We’re ready, ready for what’s next — hope you are, too!

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Audioblogging via Audioblogger.com

One of the reasons we want to start using Blogger is the integration with Flickr’s wonderful photo sharing tools. The photo at right is from my Flickr account and was uploaded last month to my photo collection.

Even cooler is the ability to send images from a cameraphone directly here on the blog via Flickr. That sounds like something we’ll be able to use at events like the “Vertigo’s Eve” party and all year long while U2 is on tour.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Photoblogging via Flickr

As times and technology changes, we’re doing our best to keep up. The entire @U2 news staff has access to posting here on the blog, so check back in regularly — you never know who will be posting or what we’ll be posting about. Most of the newsy items will continue to be posted on our home page under “Bits And Bytes”, at least until we move @U2 to a new server and do some other site upgrades.

One of the most common requests (complaints, really) we get is that the news stories written on “Bits and Bytes” are available for a week or so, and then disappear forever. So we see the @U2 blog as one way to solve that problem. At some point, probably several months away, this blog will be integrated into our home page as a replacement for “Bits and Bytes”. Not only will we have archiving at that point, but we’ll also have comments and feedback from @U2 readers right with the Bits and Bytes material.

There are two other reasons we want to move away from the current B&B setup to what a blog offers, and particularly, what Blogger offers: integration with 1) Flickr, and 2) Audioblogger.com. As you’ll see in the next two posts, these two features will give us the opportunity to bring you immediate visual and audio reporting from anywhere we happen to be. I think you’ll like the new opportunities for news reporting we’ll be able to do from here on out.

So, welcome to the newest feature of @U2. Enjoy!

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Welcome!