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 🙂
BlogDesk works fine under Vista, you just have to install one missing system file. More details here: http://www.blogdesk.org/en/faq.htm#9
Man have you had a worse experience with Vista than I have! Odd that you can’t get BlogDesk to work, I had no problems with it under Vista. That said, I think LW 2 is a fantastic app. I had been using the previous ones for a while, tried BlogDesk for a while (knowing it was your fav), but really missed the Blog this… buttons.
Regardless, I think the LW team is really serious about making a great app. They e-mailed me after my post, okay maybe because they wondered why someone who worked for Qumana would rave about their app (cause I’m not with Qumana anymore).
I am looking into various old hacks for UTW support but it does look quite reasonable.
What they really need is built in trackback (sending) support for platforms that don’t have it as default, such as Blogger.
I’ve used the new Live Writer now, with some trepidation having also “experienced” the previous version. I’m impressed. Seemed to work seamlessly on two different WordPress blogs and a BlogHarbor one.
Tris
it really, really is a brilliant app. The only thing missing is clip-board editing support like Blogdesk has, it’s not a major issue for me these days as I’ve got Photoshop open all the time, but it would be nice to be able to edit screenshots within Live Writer.
Des, so far, so good from me. Shame it’s only a blog post tool, I wouldn’t have mind using it as a word processor as well 🙂
There is a plugin for Snagit
Not wanting to sound like a shill for myself, but I’ve got a WordPress plugin that will allow you to customise the side blog panel in live writer: http://blog.slaven.net.au/archives/2007/06/05/windows-live-writer-wordpress-plugin/
Very beta, but I thing there is some serious potential to do some cool things with the custom buttons that can display content from a remote site.