The Windows Live Writer team just posted the Beta 2 which is now available for you to download. It has a handsome list of new features, but nothing I hadn’t really seen in a blog editor before:
- Inline spell checking
- Table editing
- Ability to add categories
- Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
- Support for excerpts and extended entries
- Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
- Paste Special
- Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
- Integration with Windows Live Gallery
- Support for Blogger Labels
- New look and feel
- Available in 6 languages
- Improved accessibility and keyboard support
My first impression of the new Live Writer was…wow! It looks amazing, and if appearance counts for anything it blows the other blog editors out of the water. It is sharp, sophisticated, and most of all, usable.
The inline spell checking and table manager are awesome features that will surely come in handy. Unfortunately it still doesn’t appear to support the XHTML standards, but I’m sure many of the Live Writer users don’t know what that is.
I played with it a little more, and two things I thought you might like to see is the appearance of the right-click menu for the spell checker, and what you can actually do with the tables. Here are two screenshots that will sum that up well:
When creating the table, it asks you for all of the basic information just as if you were creating it in a word processor:
As you can see there are a lot of great things available with the new Live Writer, and you should consider giving it a shot. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Post2Blog which coincidentally turned to freeware the other day. It is a great application that has a ton of features, but I would have to say that Live Writer looks better and is a little simpler to use.
So what’s it missing? Despite Live Writer supporting plug-ins, I still think there are some things that should be built-in. Some of these things might be available via a plug-in, but this is what I would like to see Live Writer shipped with:
- XHTML standards compliance
- Table options (a.k.a. the stuff from the Table Menu) should open in the sidebar like they do when you click on an image.
- Customize the order of the categories (I don’t know of any blogging software that does this though).
- Enable Auto-saving by default. I don’t know who wouldn’t like the assurance that their documents are constantly being saved?
- Align buttons! If I want to center some text, I shouldn’t be going to the Format -> Align menu. That takes way to long. There should be buttons to do this. Also, what about the shortcut keys for aligning things, such as Ctrl+E for centering?
- I’m not sure about this one, but maybe make the sidebar expand/contract when you hover over it? That way it saves space and is still extremely easy to get to.
- I would like to create snippets as well. That way some of the repetitive things aren’t so…well, repetitive. This is great for people who guest blog and always conclude each post with a short summary of who they are.
I’m curious if you could elaborate on this? I’ve used WLW quite a bit and the posts validated (xhtml transitional). Well, I take that back, there’s one nit with hyperlinked images (atomicselection attribute) but aside from that…
Are there other validation issues to watch for that you could quantify?
Frankly, TinyMCE (aka the WordPress visual rich editor) doesn’t always get it (validation) right either — WLW is a lot “friendlier” imho.
Wow. Nice slam. Do WLW users have to alternate posts with vi/emacs/wlw to be cool again?
It looks to be a nice new version, I am running Vista business and i was not available to have it install on my pc. The installed stop working just after telling me that it have to modifiy my system for it to be install and after that nothng. Any tough about that ?
@Chris: There is a [groups.msn.com] regarding why Live Writer is not XHTML compliant. Also, comparing it to “XHTML Transitional” isn’t exactly what you should do because it is a lot more lenient on the standards (it accepts traditional HTML as okay). The biggest thing is that everything needs to have a closing tag, images, breaks, etc…
I wasn’t trying to bask WLW users at all with that statement, I was just saying that most of the people using the software probably won’t care nor will they know what is/isn’t valid XHTML. Heck, our site doesn’t even validate because I got a little lazy when I finished coding it.
@BlaiseWow: I’m not sure why that didn’t work for you, maybe you need to run the install as an administrator (by right-clicking on the install program) because it sounds like it wasn’t able to get the proper permissions.
I keep using the shitty Blogger Editor.
Unfortunately I allow email subscriptions to my blog and if I post with other editors the are not sent automatically.
Also I like to add small images that are automatically linked to the bigger versions. Does Live Writer or any other Editor do this?
Yes, most blog editors do offer some sort of thumbnail feature. We use it here on our site as well, and it is nice because then you can actually choose the size of the thumbnail.
i tried your solution and no luck …. i got a message telling me that live setup have stop working ….. Maybe Vista is to new ?!?
:roll:
mmmm i found the problem and i think it may help other users. This week a leaked version of messenger 8.5 was available bt in spanish …. To be able to install all the new betas (messenger, live mail and writer) they need to be in the same language.
repeat after me, never installed leaked beta …
the solution is to erase the folder of messenger and all in program data (hidden folder in vista)and to restart the installation.
Ahhh, I guess that makes sense. Thanks for letting us know!
So Ryan, if you were to pick between WLW and Post2Blog, which would you?
And, what? No comment notifications (in your blog) by e-mail?
I would definitely choose Post2Blog. It has a ton more features, even though at times it seems like it has too many.
I’m actually using Post2Blog on our site.