Windows Live Writer Preview

The newest version of Windows Live Writer has been released as a technical preview, primarily to showcase changes to the SDK. That isn’t to say this build is simply internal changes, you’ll find a number of new features and even some UI modifications.

In fact I think once you have a bit of a poke around you’ll discover quite a few changes which really improve the program.

Changes to the UI:

• The addition of tabs along the bottom of the screen which switch views between normal, preview and HTML. It doesn’t look quite as attractive but it’s certainly more usable
• Toolbar revised and Weblogs menu moved to the top right
• Search through your categories

New Features:

• Video Publishing was possible through a plug-in, but now it has been incorporated into the program.
• Image editing, now you can add 5 more borders to your images and rotate, adjust contrast, tilt and crop. The addition of crop is particularly useful.
• Word Count! Boy I’m sure glad this was included… I would say that out of all these changes it’s the feature I most wanted, even though you could get it through a plugin.
• Support for.gif, Lightbox and other image previewing effects
• Addition of ‘check for updates’ in the help context menu
• Images can now be centred from the properties panel
• Automatic linking to specified terms. (example: I could specify a frequently used word such as gHacks to be auto-linked)

SDK changes

These are quite significant changes, but I think I can foresee some issues coming in the future. The SDK now allows for two new plugin types:

Code can now be executed before or after a blog post is published. Two example have been included with the preview for Twitter and Digg. This means blog posts can now be automatically submitted to Digg or your Twitter stream or a myriad other services. While this is handy it does mean some people will abuse the system.

Digg isn’t about submitting every blog posts you write, it’s about submitting a page that is actually good. That was the whole purpose, filter out the crap. Otherwise how does Digg become different then simply having your blog indexed by Google?

Plugins can also now be created to insert content into your headers or footers plugins can insert content as you publish your blog post.