An iOS feature 3.4 million years in the making

Since the dawn of time, humans have consumed information on tablets.

Imagine the first time someone was sitting in their cave, just watching a movie on their stone tablet and they tried turning it sideways. If only the glyphs would turn sideways too, everything would have fit so much better! If only. It seemed almost obvious in retrospect.

Ever since we launched our iPad app in April 2014, the number one feature request we’ve gotten has been landscape mode. When we added the ability to publish posts from the app in March of this year, these requests doubled. Then, with the recent release of the iPad Pro and iOS 9 multitasking, our app stood out for its lack of support for these new features and devices.

About a month ago, we launched support for landscape in our iPad editor.

Still, users wrote in all the time saying they wanted to read in landscape too. We’re extremely excited to announce that we have now fully left the stone age and offer full landscape support for both reading and writing.

The home stream in landscape mode on iPad

A Medium post in portrait and landscape on iPad

New for writers

Writing on the go is now better than ever.

Our new editor toolbar

Bold/Italic — Just select some text and the new editor toolbar changes to give you control over the selection’s style.

Adding markup to selected text

Ordered and bulleted lists — tap the list button on the toolbar to turn the currently selected paragraph into a bulleted list, an ordered list, or back to regular text.

Embeds — You can now add embedded media like links, videos, Tweets, and more. Simply paste a link on its own line in the editor and hit enter.

Mentions—Type an @ or tap the icon to mention anyone on Medium. Hi Jimmy O’Neill!

Publish to a publication — you may now publish directly into any Publications you edit. Just tap “Add to publication” in the publish flow.

Sharing and viewing drafts — Share drafts with others directly from your phone by swiping on the draft in the listing.

Profile editing

You can now edit your profile right from the app. Go to your profile and tap “Edit” in the top right to change your profile picture, name, or author bio.