What’s New with Windows Live Writer
- Posted: Dec 18, 2008 at 6:27 AM
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- 4 Comments
One of the programs that received an update when the Windows Live Essentials were released earlier this week was Windows Live Writer. Although the Windows Live Essentials are still considered beta programs, the updated version of Live Writer feels like a complete product with its fresh new design, new features, and the overall improvements that have been made.
So What’s New?
Insert Multiple Photos: One of the new features you’ll notice in Live Writer 2009 is the ability to insert multiple photos and Windows Live Photo albums. With this, you can easily insert several photos at one time. Because of Live Writer’s tight integration with Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can also insert the photos and have them sent directly to your Live Photo Gallery upon publishing. Alternately, you can select photos from an existing album to add to your post.
Search Your Drafts: If you keep a lot of unpublished posts handy for when you have blogger’s block, you’ll be glad to know that the new version of WLW has an integrated search feature which lets you search through your old drafts by keyword.
Tag Suggestions: For those of you who tag your posts in your WordPress blogs, the new tag suggestions feature will auto-suggest tags as you begin to type. Now you don’t have to worry about tagging things incorrectly or creating near duplicate tags.
Insert and Publish to YouTube: Video bloggers - if you hadn’t yet discovered this feature before, you’re going to love it. From the Insert –> Video option, you can browse for a file on your computer and have it automatically upload to YouTube or Soapbox upon publishing. How convenient is that?
New Plugins: The version of WLW supports plugins, all of which can be found at the Windows Live Gallery web site. If you haven’t already added these plugins, they are definitely must-haves:
- FLICKR UPLOAD
Uploads an image to your Flickr account and inserts an inline picture into your post. - DIGG THIS
Automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer. - TWITTER NOTIFY
Automatically generates a TinyURL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.
According to the Live Writer team blog post, the complete list of new features in this version includes the following:
- “Instant photo” border treatment
- Insert multiple photos
- Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
- Insert and publish video to YouTube
- Spell checking in: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
- Server-side tagging (support coming soon to WordPress.com and BlogEngine.NET)
- Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
- Improved blog account setup
- Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
- Support for bidirectional languages
- Updated look and feel
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I am sorry, but your "Spell checking in ...." in INCORRECT. current version supports ONLY spelling in English. It is actually disappointing that the author of this entry did not bother to VERIFY the list of published features. I understand that the reason for this web site is to promote MSFT products, but instead people become VERY cynical about this company. Reputation (good or bad) is something that people, companies earn, so shape up folks. I really want to support you, but you make it so difficult...
Boggy,
The reason for this website is to have a dialog with consumers and enthusiasts like yourself. Tell us what you want to see in Windows Live Writer, we'll take your feedback back to the team. As for this feature, you should check to see if you have the latest version.
Version 14.0.8050.1202
New Features
Here are the new features available in this version:
Spell checking in: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
Boggy, I see the other languages just fine...
Hi Larry,
. I should have been more understanding, since it IS still a beta version.
First of all, I would like to apologize for the tone of my first message. After reading it, I realized that it was "a little bit" on an angry side. I guess, it was a reaction to unfulfilled expectations, with a significant time of time spend on installation.
Having said that, unfortunately I have to say - " I WAS right". (I am not trying to gloat... really, really. Just giving my observations, test results).
I took the time to reinstall all Live modules from my Laptop. (with all the necessary reboots), and reinstalled "English" version of Live Writer. Well, dictionary directory contained only 2 files mssp7en.lex and mssp7en.dll. This obviously gave me only 4 versions of English dictionary.
So, I continued with second installation, this time in Polish. this DID provided me with 2 additional spelling files for that language (English dictionary files remained intact), but .... all user interface (as expected) was now in Polish. No good.
In third step, I decided to run the installation of Live Writer again in English. This time, the "update" program replaced all the Polish interface with English (so far so good) AND ... removed 2 dictionary files for Polish language.
All of the exercise would have been for nothing, if I did not make an educated guess and follow the old rule of "trust, but verify", and created a backup copy of the two (now) missing files.
So, the only conclusion to my experiment is that the beta version has still some bugs that in some still to be determined situation will not install all necessary dictionaries, OR the feature claim is misleading (or unclear at best).
Blogging is such a specific environment, where people many times use multiple languages for the same time. The ONLY reason I would consider using LiveWriter's automatic support for edited languages in addition to the "offline" access. Yes, I could use Polish, or Russian, or German interface as I edit my files, but ... why should I. I prefer English ,since it is my daily interface for all other programs.
Yes, I could use my browser to edit the blog with Google's toolbar and its spell checker, but again ... I'd rather not.
Also, it does worry me the issue of LiveWriter altering the meta tags of used pictures (thanks Gcoupe for bringing it up). This "undocumented feature" would kill Live Writer for me.
Just so you have the right picture of my environment:
Live Writer: Version 14.0.8050.1202
O/S: XP with SP2.
Thanks again, for the otherwise great product , and for fabulous on10.net site. It became one of my "regular" daily stops.
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