Bloggers tool improved, Windows Live Writer reviewed June 5th, 2008

It became what it should have been in the beginning. Windows Live Writer team has released an update of their product with significant changes which directly impact Writer users. If they’d have made this improvements a little bit earlier, probably would have saved my time from being forced to finalize my posts from within WordPress admin panel. Speaking of it, Windows Live Writer is publishers number one favorite tool for blogging. If you ever got a chance to drink a coffee with me, most probably you could hear me declare: “There are only two products Microsoft deserves to be acknowledged of, Visual Studio and Windows Live Writer.” In a nutshell, following are the latest changes.

New Features for users:

Video and Image Publishing Enhancements
  • Upload videos to Soapbox
  • Image cropping and tilting
  • Additional border styles
  • Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
  • Support for centering images
Editing Enhancements
  • Auto Linking
  • Smart quotes/typographic characters
  • Word count
UI Improvements
  • Revised main toolbar
  • Tabs for view switching
  • Improved category control with search/filtering

New for developers:
SDK Updates
What is pretty much obvious once you fire up Live Writer are the tabs to change from three different modes: Edit, Preview and Source. In previous versions this was done only through main menu, now tabs came as a very useful addition.

writer_view_tabs

Image manipulation just got better. Earlier we weren’t able to align any post image left, right or center it. But now when you select an inserted image you’ll have the opportunity to align it as you wish, even various types of borders can be applied. I’ll use the Rounded Corners on this post for they seem to look just nice.

writer_image_align

writer_image_borders

As stated above, cropping & tilting is now the newest opportunity one can experience within Live Writer.

image

The main menu is much better organized and specific tasks are in appropriate places. Although there’s something I would have made different though. In the top-right of Live Writer’s window there’s this button which has completely the same options as the Weblog menu. If they’d have asked me I would turn that into a Switch blogs button. Thus, giving the user an easier way to select within blogs.
Actual functionality
blog_switch1
My suggested modification
blog_switch2

And finally, there’s an option called Word Count. Honestly this is where Windows Live Writer Team beats Automattic. WordPress still lacks this function promising to bring it with the future 2.6 release, hopefully.
In Live Writer now you can check how many words your post consists of, paragraphs, characters with and without spaces.
And this post overall consists of
writer_wordcount

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3 Responses to “Bloggers tool improved, Windows Live Writer reviewed”

  1. muhamer On June 5th, 2008 at 3:29 pm

    It is very nice topic I love it .Just keep gooing.
    You my man…

  2. Mchilly On June 11th, 2008 at 6:39 am

    Interesting topic keep posting :-)

  3. Arian Xhezairi On June 11th, 2008 at 6:11 pm

    @Muhamer & @Mchilly
    Thank you guys, I’ll try to keep going and keep posting but I’m running out of will currently.
    I hope one day iTechnologize will reach the goal I’ve planned for it, but until then it’s kinda hard to pass through the obstacles.
    Thank you again.

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