Sep

27

Windows Live Writer 1.0 Beta Released

September 27, 2006 |

Microsoft today released a new beta version of Windows Live Writer. While the release has been noted by quite a few bloggers, I haven’t seen a review yet, so here are my two cents:

  • starts up way faster
  • Category menu has been fixed (it used to run past the screen limit without a way to scroll beyond the screen)
  • tags now supported natively (no more need for a plugin)
  • there is now a plugin gallery
  • a ‘blog this’ plugin is now available for Firefox and IE, making blogging even easier
  • one thing I would still like to see: a way to add categories not already in the list

Overall, this is a useful update from the first version. Ever since that first version, Live Writer has been my blogging client of choice. It is nice to see Microsoft release a really good and useful product now and then (though I am already a big fan of Office 2007 - more about that in another post).

Here is the official list of updates and new features:

  • Tagging support
  • Support for Blogger Beta
  • Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
  • Improved startup performance
  • Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
  • Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
  • Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
  • Custom date support for Community Server
  • Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
  • Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
  • Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
  • More robust image posting to Live Spaces
  • Improved style detection for blogs
  • Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
  • Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
  • Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts

    • And here is direct download link.

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