WordPress has launched a desktop application for Windows to manage WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled self-hosted sites. Previously only available for Mac, the new software provides a snappy experience on your desktop.
The app comes as zipped download from desktop.wordpress.com which extracts to a 47MB setup file. Unfortunately, you have no choices during the install. This makes it simple but also means it installs to: “C:Program Files (x86)WordPress.comWordPress.com.exe”
The app includes a My Sites dashboard to manage multiple sites from the software, a post editor with auto-save functionality, WordPress stats, notifications, and the WordPress Reader to follow sites.
To make this post full meta, it was composed using the new desktop app. My experience has been very enjoyable. It is much faster than using the site interface. I have also been experiencing some issues where some of the content would be wiped out and replaced with duplicates of some URLs from my notes. I am hoping this editor will prevent that problem. With that problem lingering for the past few months, I have been checking out other desktop editors but found it to be a fairly dried up market. I tested some of the surviving editors but have had problems connecting to my sites and found the image upload process less than ideal.
For a self-hosted site with the Jetpack plugin installed, the process of connecting the site was super easy. I just signed in with my WordPress.com account. That automatically pulled up all of my sites registered with the account. From there, editing posts and adding new ones was easy and fast! oEmbed content still works just as easily as pasting the URL.
You do lose the add-ins to your editor that you might have in your site, like a syntax highlighter for my site, but that could be touched up after the main content is written. Neat features to come could allow offline editing, Markdown support, and the ability to use plugins to extend the functionality of the editor. One post completely written in the app and I think it is an exciting way forward.