Jun
02I have been playing with this for quite a while now and nearly begging Joe Cheng and the Live Writer Team to let me blog about it.
I have raved about Windows Live Writer before but now you really have something special for your blog writing needs. Special enough that I even use it (via a virtual machine) on Mac because nothing for OS X comes close.
So what is new in this new version of Live Writer you ask? Well, let me show you…
Fun with Images
The most obvious change you will find on blog posts is the addition of new ways to view your images. The new image styles show reflections, pixel borders, rounded images and even allow you to tilt the image in question for dramatic effect…
In addition to these effects, you can also use the filter effects from before and even crop a photo from the original right in live writer!
In addition to these display features, you can also seamlessly integrate with your favorite modal popup type like Lightbox, Slimbox, etc. One other oft-requested feature is the ability to center images as well.
The beginnings of video integration are there as well with Soapbox support. Of course there are a myriad of plugins to work with your other favorite video sites.
Editing
One thing I am super excited about in this release is auto-linking. Not only can you create a database of words and phrases you use a lot and set them to link automatically, you can also do it as you create a link through the interface:
This is really useful to get your database going as you write instead of trying to think of things when you first set it up or forgetting to add them later when you think of them.
User Interface
Also big to those that really tweak their posts is the new tabbed interface for Edit, Preview and Source. Now you can quickly flip back and forth between these three modes with no effort.
The toolbar has been cleaned up a bit and for those of you like me with tons of categories, you can now search and filter for those quickly instead of browsing a monster list. This makes it really easy to get your posts in the right place.
SDK Updates
From what I understand this is where the real meat to this new version is. I don’t develop against it, so I can’t say for sure but for more details about the SDK, please see the blog post on Windows Live Dev.
Final Thoughts
Collectively these may not sound like a huge major release and I agree, if I was paying for it I would have to really need these features to pony up an upgrade, but this software is F R E E folks. It costs you nada, it’s not ad supported and has no nag ware. Windows Live Writer was already the best blogging software on the planet, and now it’s gotten even better. For those of you who are not already familiar with Live Writer as it stands now, I cannot recommend it enough.
The team that works on this product at Microsoft is passionate, brilliant and don’t ever stop thinking of cool things to make your blogging life easier. It would be interesting to try and take some sort of straw poll to see how many professional bloggers are already using this tool, there really is nothing like it.
So now you want it right? Get your butt over to the Live Writer Team blog and download it now.
