Windows Live Writer Updated

By: Chris Murphy

After about a year of blogging using Windows Live Writer, I can honestly say that Microsoft has actually managed to produce a piece of software that I love (it doesn’t hurt that it’s free as well). I had some serious reservations about the software, but aside from a few (solvable) quirks, it has been a reliable and productive blogging tool for me. The Live Writer team has recently updated the software and the timing could not be more perfect as it coincides with the much blogged about release of WordPress 2.7.

In an earlier review of the last Live Writer Release Candidate I outlined some of the key features that got me interested in the software, but I’d like to take a moment to point out a few productivity features that aren’t well highlighted in this release.

Cropping:

The cropping features in WLW improves the productivity for a writer with limited time by providing an easy to use interface for adding custom crops to images used in the post. Access to the cropping features is located under the “advanced” tab available when a new image is inserted into the post. From there, you can select from a list of image manipulation actions – in this case “crop…”. What makes this single feature truly useful is the list of available defaults such as a “square” crop that automatically constrains the cropping selection. The devil is in the details with this one, as the author is able to see what the crop looks like in the editor window as the crop selection is being dragged.

Tabbed View Switching:

Like many bloggers, I like to see how my posting will appear on the live blog before I commit to a posting. In earlier versions of the software you had to use the menu bar or shortcut keys to jump back and forth, but the the new tabs at the bottom of the main editing window work much better.

Auto Linking:

It’s about time. Seriously, though – this is a feature that I’ve been hoping someone would develop. I’m not sure if it’s unique or not, but it certainly saves me a lot of time creating links to sites. If you’re not familiar with the feature, what it does is provide a secondary library of terms and names that the editor uses to create automatic links for. For example, if you typed the name WordPress into the editor, a link would be created from that name. There are some limitations to the feature of course (and this can be solved by creating a couple common permutations of the term), for example: “WordPress” vs. WordPress (without the quotes). What’s more, you can set some basic conditions around how many times the link appears in a single post (avoiding link clutter).

Video Embedding:

Windows Live Writer has some nifty built in feature that allow authors to embed video in their postings from popular services as well as giving the author an opportunity to preview the video before committing it to the posting.

I personally don’t add a lot of extra media to my posts (maybe I should), but in all honesty I can see this feature being quite popular for power-bloggers.

Full Feature List (available official blog)

• New border treatments (including Instant Photo)
• Crop and tilt photos
• Insert multiple photos
• Toolbar alignment commands enabled for images
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Additional spell checking languages: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia),
• Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak,
• Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (for supported blogs)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Twitter, Digg and Flickr Plug-ins
• Improved blog account setup
• Lightbox and Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Improved category control: adding categories, type-down filtering
• Tabbed view switching
• AutoLink glossary
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count
• Support for bidirectional languages (like Hebrew and Arabic)
• Tabs for view switching
• Updated look and feel

Conclusion:

All in all, if Windows Live Writer keeps on this development track, I can see it quickly becoming a standard blogging tool for PC based users (If you’re on Mac, I’m sure there are a handful of great apps you can leverage).

For more information about Windows Live Writer, visit the website here.

• Posted: January 20, 2009
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