WordPress woos mobile bloggers with a new HTML-free WYSIWYG visual editor for iOS

While blogging from your touchscreen phone or tablet may not be as fluid as working from your laptop, plenty of writers still do it — which is why this week’s WordPress update for iOS is particularly notable.

The all-new visual editor brings a much-needed what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, meaning you can see exactly what your post will look like before you hit publish, including bolded text, links, italics, and lists. The new version of the app also lets you insert images with a single tap, with the image visible within the text as it will appear when you finally push it to the public.

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Here’s how the old version of the app looks versus the new incarnation.

Launched initially in 2003, the Automattic-operated content-management system (CMS) has emerged as the most popular blogging platform on the Web, with almost a quarter of all sites using the service. So it’s perhaps fair to say that this app refresh has been a long time coming, given that the Android version of the app has offered WYSIWYG for a while.

It’s worth noting here that the WordPress mobile apps work across both the “hosted” WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress.org platforms, so whichever of the two services you use for your blog, the mobile app will work just fine. Oh, and if you actually prefer the old way of doing things on iOS, you can easily toggle between HTML and the new visual interface.