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WordPress.com launches new app for Windows

WordPress is the world's most popular blogging platform, and WordPress.com is where tens of millions of blogs built using the open source software are hosted. According to Automattic, the company that owns it, WordPress.com sites are viewed by over 400 million people, generating over 15.5 billion page views, every month; and tens of thousands of new sites are created every day.

A couple of weeks ago, WordPress.com overhauled its web interface, and released a new app for Mac. Today, it's announced a new desktop app for Windows, which it says is "simple, seamless and blazingly fast."

The new Windows app will be immediately familiar to WordPress.com users, allowing them to manage their sites - including those that are self-hosted, via the Jetpack plugin - as well as writing and publishing content, viewing stats, and even customizing and tweaking the design of their sites:

The new Windows app includes:

  • The My Sites dashboard for managing multiple sites, whether WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress with Jetpack.
  • The new WordPress.com Editor, with in-app previewing and draft auto-saving.
  • The Reader, which lets you follow and read any of your favorite sites, and the all-new Discover, which recommends outstanding content from across all of WordPress.
  • Insights and Stats, which show you exactly how your site and posts are performing.
  • In-app notifications, so you can see comments, likes, and new follows all in one place.

As you may have noticed, the app hasn't been designed for Microsoft's new Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which allows software to run across multiple Windows 10 devices, including desktop PCs, notebooks, tablets, phones and other form factors. Instead, it's a Win32 application based on open-source, cross-platform Electron software, which integrates with Automattic's own Javascript application, Calypso.

It's worth noting that WordPress.com isn't alone in deciding not to build a UWP app; Wire, for example, made the same choice when it released its first Windows application back in October. Automattic did previously launch a Windows Store app for WordPress.com back in 2012, but it was focused on content consumption, rather than creation; the company says that its new Windows application is its first "full-featured" software for Microsoft's OS.

Incidentally, Automattic also shared a little nugget of info with us that may be of interest: the number of Windows users of WordPress.com is more than twice as large as that of Mac and Linux combined.

The new app is free and available to download here.

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