Using the WordPress.com App to Connect and Post to a Self Hosted WordPress Site

In this post, I’ll detail my first run through and impression of the WordPress.com Desktop Application for Mac. This app gets installed like any other software program on your Mac and allows you to do a lot of cool things with your WordPress.com sites as well as your own self-hosted WordPress sites.

WordPress.com App Video Tutorial

What I Liked About the WordPress.com App

Using the app to create and publish my blog post was easy. The interface was simply and most of the tools and editing features stayed out of my way. This allowed me to focus on writing my content rather than being distracted.

It was fast. Faster than writing and publishing a post in my browser.

What Bothered Me About the WordPress.com App

Two things:

1. The Jetpack plugin is required along with the Manage module. The one thing that bothered me when activating Jetpack and connecting to my WordPress.com account was that Jetpack auto-activates various modules. As you can see in the video, I simply deactivated every module except the Manage module.This isn’t really a complaint about the WordPress.com app itself, but I had to voice it because using Jetpack is required and part of the process of using the app.
2. Adding Media was mostly easy but as you can see in the video I ran into some confusion when adding a Featured Image to my post. It came in sideways and there was no immediate understanding of why this happened. I also couldn’t see or define the actual image sizes. It seems that the advanced image editing tool just isn’t there (yet).

Overall, I enjoyed the experience and will likely be using the WordPress.com app for future blog posts on this site and on some others.

My thoughts on Calypso, the new WordPress.com backend interface

This app uses the new Javascript-based Calypso code base. To learn more details about Calypso and get opinions from 16 WordPress power users (including myself), check out this series of interviews on PSDtoWP.net

What do you think?

Have you used the WordPress.com app yet and if so, what was your experience with it? Let me know in the comments.

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