WordPress now powers a shocking 25% percentage of the whole web at and it’s not that surprising. It’s is easy to install, easy to operate, and has a huge community developing great themes, plugins, and add-ons of all sorts to make it suitable for most websites.
Recently, WordPress continued to push forward its dominance by updating the WordPress.com site, open sourcing the WordPress.com site (matching the open source nature of the WordPress CMS) and releasing a series of new Mac, Windows and Linux desktop apps for users.
Blogging apps aren’t new, but have certainly declined in popularity in recent years, so is the WordPress desktop app worth checking out, or are you better off looking at a third party app?
The Good
The greatest feature of the New WordPress app is that it supports WordPress.com sites as well as self-hosted WordPress.org sites. It also has a really clean interface with few distractions, but plenty of features. Unlike logging into your WordPress dashboard, the WordPress desktop app interface doesn’t have all the admin panel on the side, nor can you open up other webpages and see their icons in the browser menu bar. Instead you have a simplified writing environment.
The Bad
Although the design of the app is lovely and clean, you might start to have a sense of “deja vu.” That’s due to the fact that it essentially a web app in a wrapper. That means that you are limited in some of its capabilities and it functions much like an independent browser tab/window.
Furthermore, you might occasionally have to open up a web browser anyway to access your WordPress admin or visit a preview of your post. While there are very good reasons for those factors, it may make you simply want to use with your WordPress.com sites.
Alternatives
The WordPress.com Website
If you like the writing experience of the application, but don’t want to download and install another app, you might just want to use the WordPress.com website. It has the same writing experience, allows you to stay in the same browser to get to your admin panel or preview your posts, and you can add a bookmark to open directly to it.
DeskPM
I am a big DeskPM fan, it was developed by John Saddington. It is a Mac app (sorry Windows and Linux users) and has a great minimal interface with Markdown support.
Blogo
Similar to DeskPM in that it is a Mac app with a minimal interface and blogging experience, Blogo has been around for a longer time, but fell into disrepair before it was bought up by another company.
MarsEdit 3
MarsEdit is another classic Mac app for blogging. It has been around for a very long time and as such has a more legacy style interface. It isn’t as “minimal” or “distraction free” as other apps, but it has plenty of features and support for a wide variety of publishing options.
BlogJet3
BlogJet is a Windows blogging app with support for WordPress as well as Blogger. It isn’t the most beautiful or distraction free, but has a host of features including some nice touches like a Flickr uploader (to save on image storage space).
Summing Up
WordPress’s new app is another great addition to the market of blogging tools. It’s more simple and less distracting than some alternatives, but isn’t the absolute minimal interfaces of others and at a great price (free).
Try it out for yourself and tell me what you think about it!
Eric Dye says
I want to like this so much! I’ve always liked the idea of using a desktop app for WordPress, but the truth is, the browser agility is really important for what I do.
However, if you want to focus more on your writing and less on messing around with your blog, I think this is an excellent solution.
Chris Wilson says
I think you’re right Eric, and I guess the familiarity of interface helps there, plus it’s free!
Blessing Mpofu says
I’ve been using DeskPM and Hemingway interchangeably. Although Hemingway doesn’t post, I use it to check readability and difficulty. I wish I could get the Hemigway in DeskPM, for example. I have considered trying to other apps you’ve mentioned but have debated if the cost is worth it (US$ is stronger than ZAR) for the sake of finding out.
I like the app and that it doubles as a reader. However, there is some functionality, even when publishing, that I have to go back to browser for. Perhaps I need more time to figure out.
Argh! another app to mess with! I don’t know if I want to spend time to discover what else it can’t do. The important thing is knowing what you want to do with an app or what it does…
Having said all that, I like that I can subscribe to other sites and use it as a reader. Being able to reblog to your own blog is another plus. Great clean editor when you just want to write… And as you’ve pointed out, Chris, the price is also great.
Curious to see how it evolves. Are you likely to use Calypso? what for?
Chris Wilson says
ah I’ve never really got round to using hemmingway but I can see why someone would. I used to use WriterPro’s syntax highlighting but they removed that, maybe Hemmingway would be a good replacement!
I really like your points about the reader option AND reblogging. I’ve done that a few times on my personal site and it works really well (on non WordPress sites too). The support in the app is good.
I think I’ll just stick to Desk, It does what I want and distracts me very little, although to be honest I blog most of the time on my iPad using Editorial (hum…I don’t think I’ve ever written a review of editorial) and so don’t use the desktop that much. usually just to add an image at the end!
It will be interesting to see how WordPress continue to evolve, I think this is a good direction they are heading in. The mobile apps have improved a lot recently too.
Blessing Mpofu says
PS: I think it’s also great that it’s also available for Linux, an often developer overlooked desktop OS…