LiveSide - News blog : Windows Live Writer

Wave 4: Live Writer To Get The Ribbon Interface?

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:45:30 GMT

Things have been very quiet in most of the Windows Live products since Wave 3 got released, but the one product who’s silence seems to bring concern about its future is Live Writer. This hasn’t been helped by some key members of the team leaving. So what is the future of Live Writer? Well, I shouldn’t worry. I spotted a tweet that shows that Writer is moving forward and aligning itself with the rest of the Windows Live (and Microsoft) way of using the ribbon style interface. It seems like an over-zealous Softie has blown the cover on it.

So what would this look like for Writer? Well, our friend PicturePan2 over at LiveSino has done a very good mock up of what Writer will quite possibly look like:

(Remember, this is a mock up, the real thing will look different from this.)

I will be interested to see what options appear in the ribbon, as well as what else has changed. So what do you guys think to Writer getting the ribbon treatment?

Thanks to @manan for the headsup.

Live Writer for Windows Mobile?

ScottIsAFool — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:43:05 GMT

Twitter has been abuzz the last 48 hours about a new project that appeared on CodePlex: Windows Live Writer for Windows Mobile. This sounds very promising, and looks like quite a good little project (albeit a slightly iffy UI). However, whilst it is a good project, I would like to stress heavily that this project is in no way associated with Microsoft, they aren’t the developers behind it. And this message seems to be getting lost amongst the twitter hype.

So whilst it’s good that someone is doing something we’ve all longed for Microsoft to do [hint hint], it’s worth noting that this is not Windows Live Writer, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the name of the project change somewhat.

Live Writer Backup Released

ScottIsAFool — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:42:31 GMT

Ok, so you got me, this is one of those shameless plugs posts. However, this is something that could benefit all you bloggers out there. Quite some time ago now (over two years!) I released my very first version of my Live Writer Backup utility, and it has remained relatively untouched since the first version of Writer went final (there were a few things that changed throughout the beta). Sure, I added extra functionality to it, but the core of it never changed. The program itself got good reviews (well, no-one pointed out any bad ones), and even some strange reviews, but still good.

But then I started to get emails and reports that there were a couple of problems with the program, most notably from people who were using XP Service Pack 3 or Vista x64. The backup functionality stopped working for them completely, which posed somewhat of a problem. So I decided that it was probably time for a full rewrite of the program (it was needed). So that’s what I did.

The latest version (now 3.0!) was fully rewritten from scratch. The only code still in the program from previous versions is the code that makes it backward compatible with the wlwbackup files from earlier versions. The UI whilst still looking similar is now done in WPF, which means it has some nice little touches to it. Having had a pretty successful [private] beta period and an even more successful Release Candidate, I am now happy to release the final version.

I shall leave you with a screenshot and the link to the codeplex site where you can download it from.

http://wlwbackup.codeplex.com. If you have any issues or queries with the program, please feel free to leave them in the Issue Tracker or Discussions sections respectively.

5 Great New Features Between Live Writer And Live Spaces

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:21:38 GMT

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):

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!
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)
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:
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).
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.

Wave 3: Windows Live Writer – A First Look

ScottIsAFool — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:27:00 GMT

So now that you can download Wave 3, we’ve seen Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Live Mail, now let’s look at Windows Live Writer:

A lot of what is in this new beta was seen in the Live Writer CTP back in June, like the SDK we have already discussed, and nothing is new from that point of view. Obviously the UI has changed to look more in line with the rest of the Wave 3 products.

Inserting videos has been a part of Writer since the final release of Wave 2 last year, and in the CTP, Writer allowed you to upload your own videos to Soapbox and insert them without ever having to leave Writer. Well, they’ve taken that one step further and you can now post your videos to YouTube.


Writer CTP	Writer Wave 3

What’s also changed with videos is you’re not just limited to Soapbox to get your already existing videos from:


Writer CTP	Writer Wave 3

Writer now supports some newer blogs, and whilst I don’t have a complete list as yet, I do know that this does include Radio Userland:

We’re also hearing that this version of Writer will also support some of the new services coming in the Wave 3 update, including photos.live.com, which should allow greater interaction between Writer and the photo services from Windows Live. So keep your eyes open here as when these service interactions do go live, you can bet we’ll be posting about them.

More LiveSide reviews of the Windows Live betas:

Wave 3: Windows Live Movie Maker Beta

Wave 3: Windows Live Mail - Calendar, Calendar, Calendar (and more)

Wave 3- Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta – What’s New- A Comparison With 8.5

Wave 3: Windows Live Photo Gallery – New Features