WordPress has rolled out a major update for its mobile blog editor for Android. WordPress 2.0 for Andorid adds a new Dashboard which makes it easy to create a new post or page, view existing posts or pages, view or moderate comments, add photos or videos, or view your stats from the home screen.

You can also tap an icon in the Quick Action Bar to access the same functions from any view in the app.

But the thing that’s most impressive about WordPress 2.0 is full support for rich text formatting and for Android tablets. Up until recently you could only create and edit blog posts in HTML view using the WordPress app for Android. Now you can change font characteristics, add links, quotation marks, or page breaks easily just by tapping a button.

You can also preview blog posts to see how they’ll look when they go live.

I did run into one problem while testing the app though. Every time I tried to add a link to a test post, the app force closed and I lost that post. It’s probably a good idea to save your work regularly when blogging from an Android device, at least until the kinks are worked out.

WordPress 2.0 for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market. The app supports Android 2.1 and up and works with blogs hosted at WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Popular blogging service WordPress has been offering mobile apps for writing posts, editing comments, and generally managing your blog for a few years. But the company’s iOS and Android apps have never been as easy to use as the web-based WordPress admin panel. Among other things, the mobile apps lack a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor for simple things like italicizing text, creating bullet points, or uploading images. Today WordPress finally launched a mobile app which looks like the web-based editor.

The only catch? It’s for webOS. Now don’t get me wrong, webOS is an excellent mobile operating system with great support for multitasking. With the HP TouchPad which hits the streets today, it’s a good time for WordPress to launch the new mobile app which appears to be designed with the tablet in mind.

But webOS also happens to be a platform that a relatively small number of people actually use right now. It’s a bit surprising that WordPress didn’t focus its efforts on developing a full visual editor for more popular platforms such as iOS or Android first. Update: Although as David Frahm points out, a key difference between iOS, Android, and webOS is that HP’s mobile platform is based on web standards — something the folks at WordPress already know a lot about.

In addition to the visual editor, the WordPress app for webOS supports a Sliding Panel view which allows you to flip between different views. The app allows you to manage posts and comments and view your blog’s traffic stats. You can also receive notifications when new messages arrive.  Read the rest of this entry »

The developers behind the popular WordPress blogging platform have rolled out a major update to their iOS app. WordPress 2.8 for iOS adds a new “Quick Photo” icon on the home screen which lets you snap a photo and insert it into a blog post almost instantly, making it much easier to create short blog posts on the go.

The mobile app also adds support for WordPress Stats, letting you see daily, weekly, and monthly traffic levels as well as top posts, top referring sites, and what links readers have clicked on the most. You’ll need to install the WordPress.com Stats plugin or Jetpack plugin for WordPress for this to work.

The Stats feature has been available in the WordPress mobile app for Android for a while, but the iOS version is cleaner and easier to read. The Quick Photo option is also a WordPress exclusive.

The developers have also added support for 10 languages including Japanese, Spanish, French, and Hebrew.

That’s the good news. The bad news is you need to know a bit of HTML to do any complex formatting with the WordPress mobile app. There’s no rich-text formatting view for adding bullet points, bold or italicized fonts, or even hyperlinks. You can add a link by starting to type “http:” into the edit window to bring up a pop-up “Would you like help making a link?” menu. But I still wouldn’t want to write anything longer than a few dozen words using the WordPress mobile app for iOS.

On the other hand, the Android app does have rudimentary support for text style adjustments and links, and I’ve frequently used it to update existing posts from my phone when I’m not near a computer.

Automattic has rolled out a new WordPress app for Google Android which you can use to blog on the go. The app lets you create and edit posts, view and moderate comments, and make other minor edits without loading up the full blown WordPress site in a web browser. The latest version adds a few features that had been sorely missing from earlier builds.

First up is the ability to schedule a post from within the app. Previously you could publish a post or set it to pending or draft status, but there was no way to schedule a post that you wanted to publish in the future.

WordPress 1.4 for Android also adds the ability to tap any post title to share the URL with another Android app. Say you want to send an article you’ve written to your Twitter contacts. Just hit the post title, click the share button, and choose Twitter from the pop up list.

You can also password protect posts in the latest app.

I’m not ready to give up the web-based WordPress user interface just yet. While the WordPress mobile apps are getting better all the time, there’s still no rich-text editor, which means you have to manually enter HTML code to make some changes, although there are buttons below the post area which you can use to change font styles, add links, quotes, or media.

WordPress 1.4 for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

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Blogging platform WordPress has released a mobile app for Windows Phone 7, allowing users to create, edit, and manage blog posts on the go. The Windows Phone 7 app joins iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian.

The new WordPress app has most of the usual goodies, including the ability to create new posts using some rich-text editing tools including bold, italics, underlining, strikeout, quotations, and hyperlinks. You can also upload photos, moderate comments, and edit existing posts using the app. The app also supports the WordPress Stats plugin, allowing you to monitor your web site’s traffic, top posts, and other data.]

WordPress for Windows Phone 7 is available as a free download from the Windows Phone Marketplace, or you can visit windowsphone.wordpress.org.

You can check out a demo video after the break.

via The Blog Herald

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As expected, WordPress has launched an updated iOS app with support for uploading videos from your iPhone of iPod touch, among other improvements.

WordPress 2.6 is available as a free download from the App Store, and supports WordPress 3.0 and WordPress 2.92 multisites. The most notable new feature is the new media library interface. Instead of simply uploading photos from your phone, you can now click the media tab to upload photos or videos.

I did notice that the photo upload feature was a bit quirky. I tried to take a snapshot of my screen, and WordPress converted the 960 x 640 pixel image into a squashed 640 x 480 pixel picture before uploading it, so it kind of looked awful on myblog.

One of the more exciting under the hood improvements is a new autosave feature. WordPress also says there have been a number of bug fixes.

Overall WordPress 2.6 is a nice step up from the previous WordPress app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, but it’s still missing a rich text editor. You still need to enter HTML code to add links, italicize words, or to enter pretty much anything other than plain text.

Automattic has just launched an updated version of the company’s WordPress app for Android, and it’s all sorts of awesome. As far as I’m concerned, the most important change is support for a new WYSIWYG text editor, which allows you to create and edit blog posts without entering HTML code every time you want to underline or italicize text, or add a link.

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It’s also much easier to add photos or videos by adding them from your gallery or shooting new ones with your phone’s camera.

But the new visual editor is just the tip of the iceberg. WordPress 1.3 for Android also lets bloggers view your WordPress Stats on a mobile device. That includes page views, referrers, search terms, and other information.

Finally, there’s also a new bulk comment editor, which lets you select a group of comments to approve, unapprove, delete, or mark as spam with just a few clicks.

Up until now the only times I ever used the WordPress app on my phone were when I needed to make a quick and important correction on a blog post on the go. With the new features in the latest version, I might actually consider using WordPress 1.3 for Android to write articles from scratch when I’m on the road.

WordPress for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.