 Hello. If you're like me, you'll have moments where you're walking around down the hallways at a conference, possibly, and some idea will hit your brain. And you want to maybe tell other people about that idea. The problem is, you're not always in front of a computer, and most of us have our phones with us. So I'm here to talk about using WordPress on your mobile device. We're all very familiar with, I'd hope, with WP Admin, maybe on your computer and also on your phone. How many people here actually use the WordPress mobile apps already? Okay, a few. It's actually fairly common. We find that a lot of people don't even know the mobile apps exist. So that's why I am here today to talk to you about them. Even if you're very aware of the apps, there are a lot of features that are baked into the applications to make life easier. A lot of the things that we can get closer to are your camera, media. The phones are always online, but they're also very much aware of when you are not online. So the applications try to handle offline scenarios better than you would expect. There's usually a little bit of a speedier experience when you're on a mobile app with your writing code that's closer to the hardware. But you also get things like push notifications and anybody that has accessibility needs, usually on mobile apps, we can try to make the interfaces work a little bit better with the things that iOS and Google have given you on the devices. I've actually seen blind people take pictures with their phone. And so I think if we can make the apps accessible to people that can't see, I think that's really cool. It's really a great experience seeing somebody use something that you've created in that manner. The apps have been around for 10 years. So in 2008, we were one of the first apps in the app stores for Apple and also Google and Android. And so they've been around for a while. We've been cultivating features for a while, but there's a lot of things in there that you may not expect. There are things in there that you should expect and one of those being editing and creating content. And for this blank screen, about two years worth of work went into it. And you may not understand why, but we've created an entire web or text view on both platforms using completely native code to allow for rich text editing and also for putting in media. And part of the problem that we ran into early on with the WordPress apps is that we couldn't really create a rich text editing experience without there being a ton of bugs or they're showing up differently between Android and iOS or didn't really mesh well with how things actually worked on WP Admin. So we've spent two years creating something that actually Apple and Google should have had in the operating system for us developers, but it didn't exist. So we created some pretty low-level things. It's one of the hardest things that we've done in the mobile apps is creating an experience. The title for the code is called Aztec, so you may see the word Aztec around. And that's what this is. It's the text view behind that. And so it lets you create edit posts with images in line and it just kind of works. And if you've used apps before that have web views embedded in them to give you that rich content sometimes you notice that there's a bit of a lag or it doesn't rotate correctly when you move your phone around. The whole goal of Aztec was so that the experience was very smooth, very performant on the devices and especially in non-first world countries where you may not have the newest phones and technology we wanted to make sure that the experience of editing content was accessible to them as well. If you have a tablet like an iPad, I would recommend even an external keyboard. When I create long-form content on my tablet, I kind of forget that I'm not using a laptop. I'm actually using a touchscreen and it's a really great time and place to just kind of pull it out anywhere, put the keyboard on and create that content that you didn't think was possible to create when you're walking through a park. As you come to expect, we'd also allow you to get through to your existing content. We present it in a way that's a little more visually appealing. We show the featured images. It's just one swipe to get between published and draft and your other scheduled posts. You can create new content easily to on any of the screens using the new post buttons on the bottom. Again, on larger screens, we take advantage of that extra space and we modify the user interface so that you can see more options on the screen. Over the last year, one of the big pushes that we've had for improving the apps is around mobile media. We try to get your WordPress site closer to the content that's on your phone, your pictures and videos. So we spent, if anybody has used the Android app, you may be reminiscent of the, what do we call it? The seven item monstrosity menu that came up when you would tap new image inside of a post. It was seven buttons long that came up. So that came, it was like the first thing we asked from the apps. But now you can scroll through all of your media images. Even the ones that are remote on WP Admin, you can look through the entire media browser. It's easy to push your photos from your phone right into the media picker on that side. So you don't even have to create a new post. You can just upload things. It's pretty cool. The idea is that we're trying to make the picker more intuitive, more performant, because the things that really pop in your post are your pictures and your videos. So we want them to be, they look good to you while you're creating your content so that you stay inspired to keep creating more. We also try to get deeper integrated with the features that Apple and Google give us being part of a mobile experience. And one of those are like share extensions on iOS and share pages on Android. So from your favorite photo application, if there's a photo that you want to turn into a blog post, you can use the built-in share features, pick the WordPress app that's listed there. And then you can add a bit if you want to put something in there for your post and you can publish it right to your site without even having to launch the WordPress apps. If you're not exactly ready to publish the content, there's also a way that you can draft it so that the next time you open the app, the post is waiting for you there to make any additional edits or if you want to do it on the desktop, it'll be there for you as a draft. One of the other things that we try to integrate with are like the cool hardware tricks and like on iOS it's called 3D Touch where you press harder on the screen and you can get alternate menus to pop up. So in this case on Android with a long press and 3D Touch on iOS, it'll bring up a shortcut menu for things that you commonly want to do with your last use site that was in the app. So if you want to create a new post right there, look at the notifications for anything that's happening on your site. It's just one quick way to get to it. And of course we do have the litany of things that you can do through administrator side of WP Admin, you can do that right through the application. Manage comments, take a look at your old posts and check out anything configuration wise that you want to change with your site. And that would include changing themes, modifying that theme, customizing it. With WebStat you can see how's that last post that you just pushed out, how's it doing for traffic? What's the most popular post that you've had over time? So it's trying to create a way for you to keep coming back into the application and get inspired about the next thing that you want to write because you've seen what was popular in your site beforehand. With notifications you can see who's liking your content, who's commenting on it. If you have moderation turned on for your comments, it's a real simple way to get in there and unfortunately get rid of the spam as well, but it's a nice place to go for that. We also have a reader built into the application, so if you want to subscribe to other WordPress blogs that there are RSS feeds, you can do that through there and consume the content through there. And there's a new feature called Activity Log. So if you ever make changes to your site and you're out and about and you realize, whoops, I didn't actually mean to install that plug-in, my site's now not working right, you can go through the Activity Log and find that and roll it back to that point. So we've done a lot of things in the application over the last couple of years, but we're now looking ahead to the next year and we're trying to plan ahead. One of the most important things that we found is that people really like having close connection to their media on their phones. So what we're trying to look at is how to let people edit their posts or edit their pictures and their videos before they publish it through the phone. And while we do have picture apps on phones to be able to do that, there's always that real quick thing that you need to do like crop it real quick or maybe apply a quick filter. So we are going to be adding a lot of media features to the application this year so that you can do that last minute edit on the pictures and get it just right before you publish. Some of the things that won't be so visual but will actually improve the experience is we're going to take a deep look into improving the offline experience. While we tried to make it really good, there's a lot of scenarios that are hard to expect to happen. You're at a conference and you have beautiful Wi-Fi like we do here, but not everybody is gifted with that and sometimes you lose your connection. You don't want to lose your post content when that happens or if you're in a subway and you don't have any connection with cellular. We want to make sure that that experience works really well so that you can use WordPress when you are inspired. The other thing too is we want to make sure that if you are creating content on one device that that content kind of just shows up automatically on your other devices so a lot of having to worry about making sure to publish and save it as a draft so we're going to think through that entire process to make that smooth. And how many people have heard of Gutenberg? So that's coming too. And we're actually using React Native for this and we're very familiar with that platform. We're taking what we have already as a fully native app and we're pushing all of Gutenberg in through React Native so we're creating, it's not a hybrid app but it's a hybrid approach to creating the native interface for Gutenberg. Mainly because there's a lot of JavaScript involved with the data model behind Gutenberg so our team is actually creating a fully native experience to use Gutenberg on your mobile device. We're able to wrap Aztec too which is awesome so all the work that we put into the rich text editing is still there, it's just part of the blocks that are going to be inside of the app. We've been really pushing forward and considering the size of the team I'm really excited to see what we've come up with because I think we're going to freak a lot of people out in a good way on mobile. It's a really great experience for creating content and the one thing that I think we really need people to do is to test it out. So we're not rolling it out to the public until February through the app store but you can actually download the apps now and there's a way to enable Gutenberg in the mobile app so you can help test the experience. Our goal is to hit, I think it's six of the core blocks for the first release and then we're looking into extending it so that we'll actually be able to take third-party blocks and make them enabled within the application. A lot of groundwork that has to happen for that but it's going to be pretty exciting when we get to that point. Just a couple simple things for requirements. You need to make sure that you're hopefully running WordPress 4.0 or newer. Not everybody has that luxury to keep up to date. You want to make sure XMLRPC is enabled and out of the box it is enabled but there are plugins out there especially security related ones and some web posts may block access to the XMLRPC connection and that's how our app talks to your site. If you ever run into problems there are forums out there that do well staffed by volunteers and there's great guides to help walk through the process of trying to figure out what's going on wrong. If your site's hosted on WordPress.com or if you are self-hosted but you have the Jetpack plugin installed then the authentication process and authorization kind of works a little bit smoother but also with Jetpack then you get the push notifications and the web stats and the REST API and then the connection is a little bit easier to get into and password. Getting the apps is super simple. Just go to WordPress.app on your mobile device and you should get redirected to the Google Play or Apple App Store for you to be able to download and one of the things I'd really like to encourage that if you do start using the application help us out. We're always looking for contributors and you don't have to know how to code for mobile devices. We're looking for people to help us test out things because Gutenberg is going to be a game changer on mobile I think and if we can get it that's experience solid among other things that we're doing we just needed to be in front of more people using it in the way that you use it because as we know as developers we like to develop empathy for who we're writing for but the reality is we don't know everybody who's using the phones and our websites so the more people that can help out the better. We're looking at all of our code on GitHub and we've also taken the time to develop a lot of tools to help the process of rolling out mobile apps work better so if you are actually working on a mobile app we've open sourced all of our tools that we've created to make that process simpler so you're free to use them as well. And we're on Make, Make Slash Mobile that's where we like to put all of our calls for testing so if you do want to see the cool new features coming out for the apps before the release to the App Store every two weeks that's where you'll want to subscribe to and look to see what you can help us out with testing. And we're in the Slack WordPress.org instance. If you ever run into anything or if there's a question that you have or suggestion plenty of us from the team are always in that room so check us out on there. And we welcome everybody's feedback. It's an inclusive environment for sure. And if you want to hit me up on Twitter, GitHub, as AstroBodies and if you see me at lunch feel free to tap on my shoulder and ask me questions. Thank you.