Windows Live Writer Review

I’m currently using Windows Live Writer to write this review.

The installation procedure was very straight forward and simple to manuever through and manage. There were a number of windows asking for information. I really wish installation procedures would combine information requests onto a single form, is this not possible?

The interface is very minimal and sparse, which is good for me. Too much clutter is getting more and more annoying for me, which is why I really like the new ribbon in Office 2007. There’s a lot of information presented in it, but it’s not cluttered.

 Live Writer has some pretty nice image management tools. Far greater flexibility with images than WordPress does off the shelf. The screen shot below shows the 3 separate image editing panels available. A list of the image transformations that are available are: Watermark, Black & White, Sepia Tone, Adjust Temperature, Color Pop, Sharpen, Guassian Blur, Emboss.

A great feature built into the program is a live preview within the application to see how your post will on the site itself.

You can save drafts and edit existing posts as well within the application. 

I’m not sure what Duncan was talking about with categories not being available.There’s a drop down list up at the top right corner (you can see it in the screen shot above: it says “No Categories” above, but you drop it down and just place a checkbox in the categories you want).

I’m going to publish this post through the application now and then open it back up to edit it to tell you how that process works. You can have the option of publishing the post, or publishing the draft to the blog too. Nice feature!

[publishing now]

Wow! Couldn’t be easier. You literally just click “Publish” and you’re done.

Nice tool Microsoft, nice tool!