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Filed under Reviews on June 11, 2007 by Joel Nagy

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

I'm writing this entry from Windows Live Writer and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed so far.  One of the things that I liked (not even related to blogging) while installing it was that instead putting the typical installation pop-ups in the center of the screen it put them in the lower right corner.  This kept them out of my way by putting them in a spot that I would still notice them while allowing me to continue with other tasks.  Simple UI enhancements like this just make the install experience a little more pleasurable.

The UI is nice and clean and makes it very easy to add entries.  I had a bit of trouble at first posting to our internal blog here at Arc90. With my own personal blogs and a few test blogs I had no trouble.  It works with almost every popular blog API, however it does lack a few features I'd like to see such as image uploading to a Blogger account or other image uploading features other than FTP.

It does support plugins, so maybe someone will be able to write a plugin that recognizes the Blogger image API, or write a plugin that works with common sites such as PhotoBucket or ImageShack.  Other popular blog apps already support handling images elsewhere so I assume this feature will be enhanced come the official public release.  One other cool feature is the ability to insert a map (using Live Maps of course.)

I've used about a half-dozen other blog writing applications and have not found one that meets all my needs.  I recently tried Post2Blog when they released version 3 as freeware, but it immediately annoyed me with a poor layout; the title of the post you are writing is on the right hand side and seems very out of place.  I had used Performancing for a while and I liked it a lot.  Integration with the browser was a nice feature but not a need in my opinion.  The other's I've used don't even warrant a mention compared to Windows Live Writer.

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