dirtyDogStink

Windows Live Writer: everyone's talking about it

Tuesday, August 15 2006

Windows Live Writer was announced a few days ago and the buzz online has been almost deafening [in a good way]! I have been using the beta releases for about the past month since the Writer team made them available internally. Honestly, I was very impressed even with the first iteration I used.  It has...

• an extremely clean UI,
• uses RSD to discover my blog information [which means I don't have to look up that crazy URL for the Live Spaces MetaWeblog API],
• the Web Preview [Shift+F11] rocks by letting me preview the entry using my style sheets
• and the SDK allows developer-types to easily create plug-ins for things like Technorati tags, Flickr photos, etc.

There are several good reviews of Writer out there [so I'm not going to bother] and here are a few I liked:

• Scott Hanselman - Fair criticism and I agree with his sentiment about using an MSN Group as a discussion board. Huh?
• Phil Haack - I look forward to any plug-ins this smart-as-a-whip dev-turned-manager can come up with. ;-)
• Omar Shahine - He's already written 2 plug-ins [while Writer was an internal-only beta].
• Dare Obasanjo - He actually helped implement the integration with Live Spaces.
• Tim Heuer - This guy was consistently on the bleeding edge of the internal-only beta and has written 2 plug-ins now available on CodePlex: Technorati tags and Flickr photos
• Microsoft Monitor - I'm not sure I agree with his 'pulling everything back to the desktop' theory, but it's interesting.
• Ken Fisher - I couldn't agree more about the clean HTML!

There you have it!  Links to download Writer, the SDK, the Writer team's blog and several reviews.

Lastly, I would like to give a public kudos to the Windows Live Writer team for something specific...the great interaction they had with the internal beta users. J.J. Allaire, Joe, Spike, Charles and Rebecca were all extremely responsive to feedback [positive, negative and indifferent]. I am so impressed with how open they were...they fixed bugs where they could, changed features when users requested it [and it made sense], explained why features couldn't be changed when it didn't make sense and have an obvious passion for their product. If only every product team out there would be like this. I highly recommend that you give them whatever feedback you have...they are definitely listening!

~tod

tags: windows+live+writer writer