With the Essentials suite recently released and Live Writer 2009 going final, I’d like to take a moment and just point out some great collaboration work between the Live Writer and Live Spaces team. Here are my 5 favourite new things (in no particular order):

1. Opening more than just 20 old blog entries
   
   Spaces itself used to limit third party applications to only seeing a maximum of 20 previous blog posts, and when you’ve been blogging for a few years (like myself), 20 just doesn’t seem adequate for opening older blog entries. This has now changed, and although there is still a limit, that limit is now 500!
   

    
   

2. Searching through the blog posts
   
   When you go to open an old blog entry, you can now search through the previous posts. Making it easy to find that blog entry you need from the 500 you just pulled back ;) (I should note that this feature isn’t just for Live Spaces, all blog types benefit from this)
   
3. Inline Photo Preview
   
   Support for Lightbox has been in Writer for a while now, but that made no difference to users of Live Spaces as we were unable to use Lightbox. Well, the Live Spaces team introduced the Inline Photo Preview and with Writer it’s easy to set your pictures to use it. Once you have inserted your picture, click on it, and click on the options button in the Image sidebar:
   
    
   
   Then when you post and go to your blog, clicking on the image will produce the following effect:
   
   
   
4. Photo Albums
   
   Photo albums allows you to take a collection of photos and put them all together in one album and give a visual representation of that album (as you can see below). The photo albums will then be stored in SkyDrive area and clicking on the View Full Album link will take you to that album so you can see the pictures as they were intended. When you’re adding an album, you can either create a new one, or use one that you created before (which is what I’ve done).
   
    
   
   Inserting gives you the following:
   
   
   

   View Full Album
   
   
   You have a selection of choices as to how to display the picture representation, I decided to use scatter for this post but there are four others to choose from. 
   
   Now, again, with this feature, it’s not just for Live Spaces (clearly), it’s for anyone with a Windows Live ID. I have included it because it uses the same image store as Live Spaces (SkyDrive).
   
5. No longer limited to 500 images a month
   
   Spaces used to limit you to just 500 images a month that you could upload, but with Writer storing two images for each actual image (thumbnail and original), that meant 250 pictures really. If you were a really keen blogger, then 250 images might get used up pretty quickly. Now though, you’re limited to whatever space you have left in your SkyDrive area, and since that’s at 25gb (for free!) you should find yourself not running out of space anytime soon.

So those are my 5 favourite new features, are they any that you have with the new Live Writer?

Nice work by the teams in question over these.