Vista Day 4 and it turns out that my favourite blogging platform BlogDesk doesn’t work under Vista.
Microsoft released Windows Live Writer Beta 2 during the week so I’m giving it a whirl with this post.
First observation: wow! hasn’t this changed!
The typing space is laid over a frame taken from your blog, complete with default paragraph widths (image pops):
Cut and paste for images is now fully supported and there is inbuilt thumbnail creation. Image editing includes effects and a number of pre-set borders.
Insert features go further again, users can insert tables and maps, and the new version of Windows Live Writer has the MOST EXTENSIVE tagging support built in I’ve EVER seen in a blog posting tool.
Forward posting is supported for WordPress blogs and users are given access to edit html along with the usual preview options.
This is literally my first post using the new version of Live Writer so it’s difficult to make a final judgement (I’ll be interested to check the markup in particular) but on what I’ve seen so far, Windows Live Writer kicks ass big time!
OK, so maybe I can be easily impressed, but this is a phenomenal improvement from the lame version 1 released about 12 months ago. It has every single thing I’d want from a blog posting tool and more. If you’re running Windows or Parallels on Mac give it a shot.
Update: looking at the markup now, it’s clean aside from a div class for the Technorati tag. I missed in the review categories, which are now fully supported along with excerts, manual trackbacks, per post comment settings (on/ off over-ride) and even keywords. This literally have everything. Now if only Microsoft would fix my Vista problem 🙂
