2
Jun

Windows Live Writer 2008 CTP – Live Blogging It … sorta

Posted by Steven Hodson in Monday, June 2nd 2008      

I was originally going to do a post today about Windows Live Writer (WLW) and some of my favorite plugins for it and then I saw the post on LiveSide announcing that the CTP (Community Technical Preview) for the 2008 version was available for download. My immediate reaction was one of Right On! where’s that download button.

For those of you not familiar with WLW it is one of the best offline blog editors available today for Windows; and from what I have seen elsewhere any other platform. Not only is it the best Microsoft makes it available totally free of charge. Between it and FeedDemon they are pretty well the only programs at this point that are keeping me tied to the Windows OS.

I had been waiting for this to be released and for once there was no pre-release buzz about other than one was due out soon. Well soon came today and I thought for the fun of it I would live blog using this post – being the first written using it – about some of the new stuff that they have sent our way.

The first thing that I notice was the addition of a tabbed view for the current post workspace:

WLW-TabView

Previously these different viewing options were only available from the View menu in the toolbar.

The second thing which I found when I went to place the above graphic is that there are some new options under the Advance Tab of the Insert Image option. As you can see in the graphic below they have added both the ability to Crop the graphic as well as applying a Tilt to it

WLW-Image Options (click for larger view)

The Title options dialog

WLW-Tilt Options

Now when I went to select the border options for the above graphic I saw that they have added some new styles there as well:

  • Reflection
  • Rounded Corners
  • 1 pixel Solid Border
  • 3 pixel Solid Border

Here is a sample of the Reflection option courtesy of LiveSide.com

WriterSplash_thumb_2

Still along the lines of dealing with graphics and video the release info on the Windows Live Blog includes support for:

  • Uploading videos to Soapbox
  • Lightbox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others but you need those plugins installed on your blog for them to work)

Still with the new stuff they have added a Word Count dialog

WLW-Word Count

As well they added Automatic Linking to terms that you have in your link glossary (eg WinExtra) so that when you type in a word; or phrase, that you have previous set a link for and added it to your link glossary it will automagically add the URL to the text. Along with this enhancement have been made to Topographic replacements such as © TM etc.

There has also been a wide variety of improvement and changes made to the User Interface. Then for the developer looking to write plugin or two this release ships with a Live Writer SDK and a Twitter sample plugin. They also addressed another one of my wishes that I wrote about not long ago and that now as well as setting the Title tag in the URL link they set the Alt tag so your link; or graphic, description will show in all browsers. I didn’t see anything yet about the no-follow option for links but that is one I would have also like to see be added to the program.

That’s it for now but on the whole I think the WLW team has done a hell of a job on this update to an already really great program. Now I realize not everyone likes to play around with beta or Preview releases of software but if you are so inclined head over to the Windows Live Blog and grab a copy.

Great job guys and a big thanks from me for all your work on WLW it makes my job so much easier.

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