For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on the team at Automattic that’s been building the app. We were lucky enough to get some great support from Microsoft along the way, especially Jeff Sandquist, James Senior, Ben Thompson, Jaime Rodriguez, Lora Heiny, and Nazia Zaman who gave us everything we needed to make the app shine, including hands-on help from Microsoft developers and designers.  We decided to focus on showcasing the best of WordPress.com for our first version of the app, and what better way to do that than Freshly Pressed? We’ve been highlighting WordPress.com bloggers there for years, and all of that great content is now accessible in our app.

We also built some special features just for WordPress.com users. After signing in to your account you can like and reblog posts from Freshly Pressed, or follow a blog to subscribe to it in the WordPress.com reader. Reblogging lets you share these posts with your followers, right on your own blog.

Beyond just reblogging, you can share content from any app in Windows 8 to your WordPress.com blog. Just open the Share charm, and you’ll find a posting interface customized to the type of content you’re sharing — whether that’s text selected on a web page, or a picture from your photo library.

By the way, I mentioned the huge archive of great posts in Freshly Pressed — try the Windows 8 “semantic zoom” gesture in the WordPress.com app to see a quick overview of the app by dates. It’s a really cool way to navigate once you’ve managed to scroll through several months worth of posts (it gets addictive!).

And of course (this is Automattic, after all), the app is Open Source. You can check our the source code of the app today via SVN at http://win8.svn.automattic.com and follow development of the app at the related Trac.

While it’s a simple first version, I think it’s a great way of marrying the unique Metro interface in Windows 8 with the cool stuff you can do with WordPress.com. Future versions will bring the ability to compose full posts and upload media, read the blogs and topics you follow, and much more. We hope you’ll check it out and let us know what you think.

If you’ve got the Consumer Preview, download WordPress.com for Windows 8.

Some of my colleagues who worked on the app have also posted their thoughts, including Stephane Daury, Dan Roundhill, and Nick Momrik.

Photo Credit: Donncha

Just settled in at home after a week in the ever-lovely town of Seaside, Florida with my Automattic homies. I learned a ton in the past week and had kind of a ridiculously good time in the process. There’s always the temptation to think how great it’d be if we could work together all the time. But then we remember these meetups are so cool because Automattic is made of people who make their homes all over the world. That said, I can’t wait to see them this spring in San Francisco. :)

Yesterday, my Automattic colleague Joseph Scott launched the VideoPress Plugin for WordPress.org, meaning anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog can now use VideoPress and their WordPress.com account for high-quality ad-free video right on their self-hosted WordPress blog. :)