We’ve just shipped another release of Windows Live Writer. This ‘Technical Preview’ is chock full of goodness, including some additions to the WLW SDK. If you’re a fan of Writer or have been waiting to check it out, now is the time.
I’ve included a gratuitous picture just to illustrate some of the great new features we’ve included.
Windows Live Writer is well known as a great desktop environment for authoring blog posts. But at its core, Writer is really an application for authoring HTML and metadata. Today, this is mostly done on weblogs, but there are a whole host of systems that would benefit from a desktop application for content contribution. Telligent is working on Grafitti, a content management system, and it sounds like Writer works great with it (likely thanks to Telligent’s work). Very cool!
Scott Lovegrove put together a good article describing how to writer a plug-in for Windows Live Writer. Make sure you check it out!
ContentSource plugins are very basic plugins and will only insert text into the blog entry. You can edit SmartContentSource plugins’ content again at a later time.
From CoDe Magazine.
Ok, now I'm just playing around with a great Windows Live Writer plug-in which inserts very nicely formatted photos. It also lets me edit the 'rel' attached to the generated anchor tag, which should enable automagic lightbox integration. Let's see!
And as a quick update, it worked just great. Very nice work.
A few users have asked about 'Blog This' support in Windows Live Writer. When you install Writer, we also automatically add a 'Blog This' feature to Internet Explorer. It turns out, however, that if you have ever customized your command bar in IE, our button will not show up by default. Instead, you'll need to add it yourself. Here's a quick and hopefully simple set of steps to do just that.
A feature in Writer that not everyone knows about (yet :) ) is it's support for publishing pages. This support is (to my knowledge) currently limited to Wordpress and Typepad. Writer does use the Wordpress API for publishing pages, so any other providers out there that would like to add support just need to implement the page portion of the API and then use the Writer Provider API to notify Writer that pages are supported.
If you are using Wordpress or Typepad today, you are in luck- here is a quick tour of pages in Windows Live Writer.
I'm here at Blog World Expo, currently sitting in on the Keynote address. I'm going to spend most of the day in the Windows Live Booth, which is #528, for my reader out there who wants to stop by!
The day has finally come and we have shipped Windows Live Writer without calling it a beta. Even though it's version number appears as 12.0.1366.1026 (I'm not sure I want to explain how a first generation product gets to be '12.0', but there it is) in the 'About' dialog, and even though it called 'Windows Live Writer 2008', it will always remain Writer 1.0 to me.
Joe, as always, has put together a great synopsis of the release featuring highlights and lowlights, and as should be the case, there aren't a lot of lowlights anymore. We spent most of the last couple of months ironing those out, and getting the product ready to be called Gold.
Congratulations to everyone who worked on and contributed to Windows Live Writer 1.0. Creating a product from nothing is an incredible challenge, and I am incredibly proud of the product that we have created.
For those of you still using an older version of Windows Live Writer, here's a new reason to upgrade to our latest beta-- native support for inserting Video. Scott has put together a great and full featured plug-in for inserting video, but video is getting to be such a basic way of communicating on the web that we really needed support built into the product, at least for basic video publishing scenarios.
If you haven't upgraded yet, video may just be the reason to do it now!
We've just shipped our most recent Beta of Windows Live Writer. Joe has a great write up of highlights and lowlights that you can check out to get the complete run down. One of the things that I really like about this Beta is that it addresses some of our most requested features, XHTML support and Blogger image publishing support. But my favorite of all? The fact that we no longer munge images unless we absolutely positively have to. This means that when you post screenshots like the one to the right here, they can look picture perfect. It's a little thing, but one that can really get under your skin if you post images.
If you haven't downloaded it yet, I think now is probably the time.
