At the start of a new year, its nice to take a look back over the previous year and reflect on where we’ve been. Twenty thirteen saw a lot of changes and improvements in the WordPress apps. Let’s look at some of them.
WordPress for iOSiOS The operating system used on iPhones and iPads.
WPiOS saw five major updates and several minor releases in 2013.
- We added a Jetpack Notifications screen.
- The ability to preview your drafts was added.
- The first time / new user experience was redesigned.
- We removed the old hybrid reader and replaced it with a native version.
- The app got a UI refresh for iOS 7 and matching styles for MP6.
We welcomed contributions from Pivotal Labs, and we’re looking forward their great work on Themes and Media features being available in the app early 2014.
We ended the year with the release of 3.8.6, our final release supporting iOS 6, and we’re all anxiously awaiting the planned late January release of 3.9 bringing a newly revamped tabbed UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. and lots of other improvements.
WordPress for Android
WPAndroid saw three major updates over the year.
- We kicked the old UI to the curb and modernized the app with a Android Holo theme, menu drawer and action bar.
- Jetpack Notifications were added.
- Version 2.5 was our biggest release of the year bringing multiple new features including: Media, Galleries, Themes, Pin Lock and Native Stats!
There were many minor updates but two of note were
Pivotal Labs also chipped in on the Android app with the Themes, Stats, and Media features.
We’re ready to kick off 2014 with the release of version 2.6 later this month. 2.6 will bring a native reader and many other improvements.
WordPress for Windows Phone
WPWinPhone was not forgotten in 2013. It saw four major updates adding support for:
- featured images
- galleries and Dashboard access
- push notifications and a rich text editor
- gallery support for self-hosted sites
GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/
Last year we saw the iOS and Android projects migrate away from subversionSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/. for source control, and embrace git. Github is now the official home of the WordPress for iOS and WordPress for Android projects.
GSoC Projects
This year we mentored two students, Daniele Maio (@b0unc3) and Sayak Sarkar (@sayaksarkar) for Google Summer of Code. They worked hard over the summer on a native app project for BlackBerry OS10, and another for Firefox OS.
Mobile Handbook
We’re very happy to have a Mobile Handbook to help developers get started working with our open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. apps. Many thanks to @rachel_mccollin for her time editing and proofing the articles.
Lots of contributors
This year we saw a lot of people from the wider WordPress and mobile community get involved by helping us test betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. versions of the apps, file issues on Github, and best of all, submitted patches for bugs and new features!
Get involved!
Twenty fourteen is going to be a great year. We have lots of great things planned for the mobile apps and we’d love for you to be a part of the experience. Its easy to get involved! Come chat with us in the #wordpress-mobile channel on freenode.net, clone a copy of the source code and send us a pull request, or just leave a comment on our blog.