WordPress for iOS

Now Available: Publish Photos Quickly Using Camera+

Isaac Keyet — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 07:11:23 +0000

If you’re passionate about posting great photos on your blog, you might just fall in love with this new feature. If you have Camera+ 3.0 on your phone (and WordPress for iOS 2.9.5 or higher), you’ll be able to quickly post photos using the Camera+ app! Simply launch the WordPress app, and tap the Photo button.

Posting a photo from the Camera+ Lightbox is dead easy. Tap “Add Photo from Camera+,” and your phone switches to the Camera+ app – select a photo to load it into the WordPress app. Add a Title and a Description (both optional), and boom! You’re done.

Using Camera+ to snap your photo is just as easy. Tap “Take Photo with Camera+” to switch to the Camera+ app’s camera. Make a “meow” sound to locate your cat, add effects, borders, and crop your photo. When you’re done, just press “Use” and your photo is imported into the WordPress app where you can add details if you want.

What’s Next

As more camera apps open up their features for other apps, we’ll look into making more options available. Camera+ was the first to open their app up for integrations, but hopefully more will follow.

For now, the Camera+ options are only available for the Photo button on iPhone, but we’re hoping to add it to the Post Editor very soon as well. If you don’t have Camera+ on your phone, the options simply won’t be shown. Be sure to subscribe to this blog and follow us on Twitter to get the latest news first.

Do you use Camera+, or another camera app? Please let us know in the comments!

New in Version 2.9: Full Screen Editing and Text Formatting

Isaac Keyet — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:25:40 +0000

The new post editor

We’re excited to give you the next major version of WordPress for iOS. The focus of this release is to further improve stability and add a few long-awaited new features.

What’s new?

A Feature-Rich Content Editor. Now you can easily format text, make bulleted lists, create links, and do all kinds of other fancy stuff. (It’s about time, right?) Read more
Full Screen Editing. No more teeny-weeny content editor — now you can view more text at a time while you post on the go. Read more
Reading Made Easy. Keeping track of your favorite blogs has never been easier. Browse all the latest posts on blogs you follow in one place, right from your iPhone. Read more (no pun intended!)

Updated features

Quick Photo will now use the post format for images (if your theme supports it).
You can now post pictures that you’ve already taken with Quick Photo.
Your stats referrer links and comment links can now be opened right from this app.

Version 2.9 also includes numerous other bug fixes and improvements not listed here. For a full list, visit the 2.9 Trac milestone.

A Feature-Rich Content Editor

Having the ability to easily style text, • create • lists, and add links has been requested since version 1.0 of WordPress for iOS. While you could type the tags manually, and use the elusive “Link Helper” feature to create links, it was not optimal.

In 2.9, a format bar is added on top of your regular keyboard that mimics the look and feel of the keys you’ve become so familiar with. Select some text, press a formatting button, and bam! The text is wrapped with the proper tags. If you don’t select any text, both the opening and end tag will be output and the cursor placed in the middle. Easy-peasy!

The format bar is enabled for both the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and adjusted to the respective keyboards and device rotation. Try turning your iPhone to landscape mode when editing a post! The bar will shrink in size to give you more space to write on.

Full Screen Editing

Your phone has a relatively small screen. When writing a blog post, a large portion of it is taken up by the keyboard itself. While you’re not likely to write an 8,000 word post on your phone, wouldn’t it be great to get just a little more space? In 2.9, the top navigation is hidden, giving you more space to write on. This is particularly useful in landscape mode, where space is even more limited.

When the post is ready to go, just press Done on the format bar and you’ll be right back in the Post editor.

Reading Made Easy

Follow your favorite blogs on the go!

If you have one or more WordPress.com blogs in your WordPress for iOS app you’ll now see a Read button in the blogs list. This is the fastest way to keep up with posts from blogs you’re following on WordPress.com. Here’s how it works: if you go to any WordPress.com blog and click the Follow button, you’ll not only get email notifications about new posts from that blog, they’ll also show up right in the app!

You can manage the blogs you’re following in your WordPress.com dashboard, where you can even add external RSS feeds.

Don’t follow many blogs yet? In the app’s “Read” screen you’ll also find Freshly Pressed, listing the some of the most interesting posts from around the WordPress.com network. Or you can tap the little arrow button and select from a multitude of interesting topics, such as Art, Technology, Books, and many more.

This Read function is in Beta and will be improved over time, so we’d very much like to hear what you like about it and what you’d want to see next! Post a comment below or reach out to us on Twitter.

What’s next?

While we’re very proud of this release, we’re not resting! We’re currently in the planning stages of WordPress for iOS 3.0 which is going to be the biggest update to the WordPress for iOS app since its birth. The plan is to take an overall look at where the app is, and streamline it for what you use it for the most.

A more imminent update is coming shortly, with updated strings for numerous languages. If you’d like to help us translate the WordPress for iOS app into your native language, check out the translation project.

So, how do you like 2.9 – and what do you expect from 3.0?

Big Update: WordPress for iOS 2.8 Available Today!

Isaac Keyet — Wed, 18 May 2011 21:39:15 +0000

It’s been in the works for about two months, and we hope you agree with us that it was worth the wait. This is the first app version in a long time where we’re actually adding features, previously we’ve been 100% focused on improving stability, error messages, and help. While these efforts will continue indefinitely, we now feel like the app is stable enough to start adding some long-awaited features. The Quick Photo button, lets you snap a picture of something happening right now and blog about it quickly. We’ve added Stats to the app (finally!). The app has also been translated to 10 languages, including Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Japanese.

Quick Photo

The “Quick Photo” button is a big step towards the next-generation WordPress app. It’s the first feature that’s action-centric, meaning that instead of picking the blog, and then selecting what you want to do with it, you pick your action first. The thinking is that an app should be all about getting in and out quickly, performing a specific task.

As you launch the app, you’ll notice there’s now a button in the bottom of your blogs list. Tap it to launch the camera and take a picture, when you’re satisfied you can add a title or a description (if you want, both are optional), and boom — you’re done! The function remembers the last blog you posted a Quick Photo to and will use that for future posts as well. Note: iPhone only for now.

Stats

Finally you’re able to check your blog’s statistics on the go. There are charts for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly page views, swipe over them to see the others. You can also see Daily Views by date, as well as top Post Views, Referrers, Search Terms, and Clicks for the past 7 days.

The Stats feature natively works for all WordPress.com blogs, however you’ll need Jetpack or the stand-alone Stats plugin to see stats for your self-hosted WordPress blog. We recommend that you enable Jetpack on your site, as we’ll add app-specific functions to it in the future to help further enhance the apps in a quicker turnaround time.

Localization

This has been long awaited for a lot of you. We’re happy to report that the WordPress for iOS app is now completely translatable, and 2.8 adds support for 10 languages: Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, German, Dutch, French, and Croatian.

Is your language not translated yet? You can very easily add it yourself, and we’ll put it in the app in a future release! To get started, visit the WordPress for iOS project on translate.wordpress.org (learn more). You don’t have to translate all strings, other people will join in to translate remaining strings.

Other changes

While we’re excited about adding a few new, much requested features, we know that stability is still an issue. We’ve been able to resolve 3/4 of all crashes in the app. This update fixes a number of additional crashes and bugs. The full list of crash and bug fixes is available in the WordPress for iOS Trac.

Be sure to follow @WordPressiOS on Twitter for the latest news.

3/4 of all crashes fixed

Isaac Keyet — Mon, 16 May 2011 17:47:52 +0000

Over the last few versions of WordPress for iOS, we’ve been able to eliminiate more than 75% of the crashes reported. While a lot of work remains to make the app as stable as we want it to be, we wanted to share the chart below which details the number of crashes per app version over the last 5 months.

WordPress for iOS 2.8 will soon become available, which has further stability improvements as well as some exciting new features.

Be sure to follow @WordPressiOS on Twitter for the latest news.

What’s next for WordPress for iOS

Isaac Keyet — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:57:46 +0000

Version 2.7.2 of the WordPress for iOS app just became available on the App Store. It fixes a number of lingering crashes and bugs. All in all 28 crash/bug reports were closed in this release:

Fixed crash when the password had a space, on comment moderation, plus 7 more.
Several bugfixes.
Use blavatars instead of favicons.
XML-RPC fix for self-hosted blogs. (Note: if you were unable to use 2.7.1, you should be able to use this version!)

Check out the Trac milestone for the complete list.

What’s next?

With the app being much more stable, it’s time to make up for lost ground. We have an agressive release schedule laid out for 2011, in which we’re hoping to add many of the things you’ve been asking about. We’re currently hard at work with WordPress for iOS 2.8 – the next major release of WordPress for iOS.

The most important to-do in the 2.8 road map is Localization. WordPress for iOS will now become much more accessible for many users. 2.8 will also introduce a Stats view (finally!), a Quick Photo button, as well as a few more nifty improvements.

We’ll never stop improving the app, wether it be fixing issues or enhancing functionality.

So, what would you like to see next?

WordPress for iOS 2.7 Now Available

Dan — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 23:03:57 +0000

After three months of development, WordPress for iOS 2.7 is now available in the App Store. This version fixes over 100 bugs, which means better performance and fewer crashes.

Reliability Updates

The main focus of this release is to improve the app’s performance and reliability. The app has been moved to Core Data, which is a much improved way of managing information locally on the device. Also, the methods used to communicate over XML-RPC have been updated to better handle communication issues and increase reliability of the app. In total there have been 117 changes in this release.

If you’re upgrading from a previous version of WordPress for iOS, your data will be migrated to the new version. If this doesn’t work, you should be able to delete the app and reinstall.

UI Improvements

We’ve cleaned up the Post Editor interface to make it easier to write and edit posts and pages. Simply select the icons along the bottom of the post editor to edit post settings, view attachments and add media. You can also now upload multiple media objects at once!

‘Pull to refresh’ has been added to the list views of the app. To refresh the list, simply pull down until the arrow flips around and then release:

Also, emails and URLs in the comment view are now tappable so that you can easily get in touch with someone who has left a comment on your site.

Be sure to update as soon as possible, and please let us know what you think of WordPress for iOS 2.7.

Get Involved

We are always looking for iOS devs at any skill level to contribute towards the app. If you want to get involved, visit the Developer section at ios.wordpress.org.

Please follow the WordPress for iOS Open Source project @WordPressiOS on Twitter to get the latest news and notifications about updates.

WordPress for iOS 2.6.5 is Out!

Isaac Keyet — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:34:27 +0000

Version 2.6.5 of WordPress for iOS is now available in the App Store. This update includes many smaller fixes and eliminates a few more crashes. All in all, more than 30 issues have been taken care of including correct image scaling for Original Size images and a number of fixes around Pages. Update now and let us know what you think!

We had to leave some issues for the next major update of the WordPress for iOS app, 2.7. This version will have Push Notifications, as well as some restructuring behind the scenes to make the app more reliable. Some of you are still reporting issues with duplicated content, which we know we’ve solved in part but needs more looking into. If it happens to you and you’re able to reproduce it, feel free to nudge us about it in the forums so we can investigate further.

Calling all Xcoders! Over at WordPress for Android we now have people contributing and making patches for the app. Of course we’d love to get more help from the WordPress community for the iOS app as well! With your help we can work out the remaining issues and make the app truly great. Holler if you want to help out!

WordPress for iOS 2.6.5 Fixes

Ticket	Summary	Priority	Component
#533	Crash when uploading videos	blocker	Media
#540	Crash when adding a picture from photo library	blocker	Media
#602	Image adding works, but image code disappears on publish	blocker	Pages
#609	Crash when accepting to learn more about VideoPress	blocker	Media
#613	Custom Size Dialog Broken on 2G	blocker	Posts
#571	Can’t change date or post password for post that already exists on blog	critical	Posts
#599	Content area has height issue, doesn’t show all content towards the bottom	critical	Pages
#608	Crash when navigating away from post if media upload is in progress	critical	Media
#632	Restore Unsaved Post is Busted	critical	Posts
#636	Autorecovery is broken	critical	Posts
#646	Can’t use app if you change wpcom username/password	critical	Add Blog/Site
#610	Image Upload fails for large pitctures (1,5MB+?) (unconfirmed)	major	Media
#611	Selecting row should check comment when bulk moderating.	major	Comments
#612	Editing and saving a page on an iPad creates a copy and doesn’t update the original page	major	Pages
#615	Landscape mode quirks	major	Compose
#618	Previewing is flaky unconfirmed	major	Preview Mode
#620	Crash on app launch	major	Add Blog/Site
#622	Image upload fails without error msg	major	Media
#623	The app doesn’t show any error msg if the server is down and you try to upload a media file	major	Media
#624	issue when attaching media to a post	major	Media
#630	Photo rotation issue	major	Media
#649	error while adding WP.com blog	major	Add Blog/Site
#546	Some Text Fields Don’t Get Focus	minor	Other
#585	Text overflows on the iPad in certain conditions	minor	Posts
#607	Can’t Edit a Page in Landscape	minor	Pages
#621	The “Discard alert” appears when there is no changes on post	minor	Compose
#626	Selecting a page draft on iPad doesn’t stick the blue background color.	minor	Pages
#628	preview is “blank” even if i’ve attached images to a new post	minor	Preview Mode
#633	Gravatars not loading in comment list on first load?	minor	Comments
#644	discard/cancel prompts in odd place when post is GeoLocated	minor	Geolocation
#645	oddities on the write screen when you have multiple blogs	minor	Publishing
#647	Save or Publish button missing for un unpublished post	minor	Publishing
#648	Blog list doesn’t refresh on iPad after saving a local draft	minor	Posts
#616	Blogs list allows landscape mode	trivial	Add Blog/Site
#625	Saving a local draft while offline still gives you a no connection prompt	trivial	Posts
#605	Image Uploader upscales images added from library that are smaller than default device size	blocker	Media
#642	Getting autorecovery prompts in odd places	critical	Posts

View closed 2.6.5 tickets in Trac.

Be sure to check out the forums and follow @WordPressiOS on Twitter.

WordPress for iOS Update Available

Isaac Keyet — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:21:00 +0000

We’ve focused on the feedback we’ve gotten from the past two releases to make 2.6.4 the most stable release of WordPress for iOS in a long time. This version cures numerous bugs and has been tested especially carefully in two areas: Media Uploader and Post Write/Edit.

The last WordPress for iOS version (2.6.3) introduced a bug where the app would save line breaks inconsistently in the code, and also remove line breaks when editing posts. These bugs have been resolved.

We think we’ve also fixed many of the issues around the Media Uploader (before if you uploaded many pictures it sometimes wouldn’t work or even crash the app). Now we’re able to upload tons of images without the app crashing, we’re really hoping it works better for all of you as well.

As always though – please let us know if not! We’re making this app for you, and your feedback is invaluable.

WordPress for iOS 2.6.4 Bug Fixes

The new WordPress for iOS Update is available now in the App Store and fixes 20+ bugs & crashes.

Ticket	Summary	Priority	Component
#579	App doesn’t save line breaks (confirmed)	blocker	Compose
#556	Autosave Recovery No Longer Working (confirmed)	critical	Posts
#572	(iPad Only) Crash on Pages tab after Deleting Page draft	critical	Pages
#573	Adding a video plays it on background	critical	Media
#576	“link help box” runs off screen, broken link formatting (unconfirmed)	critical	Compose
#587	CoreData Crash with Pages on iPad	critical	Pages
#589	unable to add blogs protected with the HTTP-Authentication	critical	Add Blog/Site
#596	Pages overview doesn’t load existing pages on first load	critical	Pages
#554	Losing content when loading other posts	major	Posts
#557	weird issues using the basic HTTP Auth	major	Settings
#574	Improvements on the XML-RPC parsing process	major	XML-RPC
#575	User Agent is Incorrect when Uploading Files	major	Media
#580	Offline Saving/Publishing flawed	major	Add Blog/Site
#582	Media uploading copy	major	Media
#588	Media Upload Issues	major	Media
#593	Changing Status of a post in Edit is broken	major	Publishing
#559	Posts not refreshing on first run	minor	Posts
#564	‘Load More’ showing when not needed	minor	Posts
#584	Media list should be ascending	minor	Media
#585	Text overflows on the iPad in certain conditions	minor	Posts

Enhancements

Added option to set any size to uploaded pictures.
Media list is now ascending, makes it easier if you have a lot of content.

View closed 2.6.4 tickets in Trac.

The Next Version

We hope you like the updates, but we were unable to fix all of the issues in this release. We’re already working hard on 2.6.5 to continue on the bug crusade. On a very high level, this is the plan for 2.6.5 currently:

Priority #1 is always to fix the issues you are reporting, so go ahead and download 2.6.4 and tell us your thoughts!
The rare duplication of content bug (some of you have reported that new posts sometimes inherits details from previous posts). We got a good lead on this.
Media uploader sometimes scales up small images if Original size is chosen.
Managing Pages in WordPress for iOS is a really bad experience, which we want to improve overall.

Be sure to check out the forums and follow @WordPressiOS on Twitter.

Version 2.6.4 in the works

Isaac Keyet — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 20:47:32 +0000

Hey all! While 2.6.3 has proven to be much more of a solid release, fixing numerous bugs, we’re not going to rest. There are issues still remaining, many of you are reporting problems with the media uploader, among other things. We’re doing our best to track the cause of these bugs down, and we’re hoping 2.6.4 will be available the first week of 2011.

I wanted to let you know that we take your feedback very seriously, wether it’s in the App Store itself, here on this blog, on Twitter, in a review on your own site, in the forums, or anywhere else you may post it. We get a bit overwhelmed from time to time, but are trying to get better at responding to every single one of you.

Remember that all the WordPress apps are in fact Open Source, so if you want to help us out and make the iOS app even better, head over to the Development section of this site to get started.

Don’t forget to rate the app if you like the improvements and fixes!

Happy Holidays // The WordPress Mobile Projects Team

Version 2.6.3 is now available!

Chris Boyd — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:33:04 +0000

We’re very happy to announce that Version 2.6.3 of WordPress for iOS is now available in the App Store! This version includes a ton of bug and crash fixes, as well as some performance improvements.

Here’s what we put in a box and wrapped up for you, just in time for the holidays:

Fix for multisite login issue.
Fix for crash when deleting media items.
Fix for occasional “Communication Error” for WordPress.org sites.
Fix for crash when selecting Pages tab after deleting a draft.
Fix for crash when entering settings during blog setup.
Fix for issues when uploading videos to WordPress.com without a VideoPress upgrade.
Fix for occasional NSXMLParserErrorDomain error for WordPress.org sites.
Fix for favicon refresh issues.
Fix for incorrect permissions related to contributors and publishing.
Fix for crash when replying to comments.
Fix for HTTP Auth setting incorrectly set to on by default.
Improvements in XML-RPC handling.
Several other minor patches and fixes.

As always, your feedback and input on this release will help guide us as we work hard on the next release, which we’ve already started coding. If you feel like 2.6.3 is an improvement over the previous release, feel free to leave us a review in iTunes to let everyone else know that they should upgrade.

Additionally, we welcome your feedback in the forums and on Twitter.

Happy blogging!