Microsoft Windows Live Writer Beta 2
Published Mon, Jun 4 2007 9:48 AM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Blogging, Cool Stuff
Microsoft has released Beta 2 of Windows Live Writer. The UI looks a little slicker than the previous beta. The install was painless. All of the plugins I added to the previous beta are still there.
At least it's not a step back like Vista was or Outlook 2007.
There are a couple of things I like about it so far. One is the enhanced "insert hyperlink" functionality. The U.I. for this feature has been upgraded a bit, and they've also added some new functionality.
Now you can insert a hyperlink to a previous weblog post by clicking a button. A dialog pops up with the most recent posts made from your local machine. If the post you want isn't in that list, you can pull up to 500 posts from each of your weblogs to find the one you want to link to. I think that will be handy. No more scrolling though the weblog trying to find a post.
The "insert picture" U.I. has been updated too. Now in addition to uploading a local image, you can specify the URL of an image from the Internet. Some of the same features are available when you do this, but the image isn't automatically re-sized. To re-size the image you have to explicitly select the options to do it. Writer also doesn't render it as a hyperlink to the original image and upload the thumbnail and original like it does when you choose a local image.
I still think it's a cool feature enhancement.
They've also added some formatting features that were missing. One that I really wished they had in the previous version was strike-thru text. Before I had to switch to the HTML view and manually edit the style tags to get it. Now, it's available by selecting the text and clicking a button.
They've also added a set of APIs that Weblog Providers can use to make the tool even more compatible with their weblogs. So far, I'm liking what I see. I've been waiting for this update for a while.
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