August 14, 2006
@ 07:24 PM

I've been late to blog about this because I was out on vacation but better late than never. J.J. Allaire (yes, that one) has a blog post entitled Introducing Windows Live Writer which announces Microsoft's desktop blogging tool called Windows Live Writer. He writes

Introducing Windows Live Writer

Welcome to the Windows Live Writer team blog! We are excited to announce that the Beta version of Windows Live Writer is available for download today.

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service. Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone. Writer has lots of features which we hope make for a better blogging experience. Some of the ones we are most excited about include:

WYSIWYG Authoring

 The first thing to notice about Writer is that it enables true WYSIWYG blog authoring. You can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it. Writer knows the styles of your blog such as headings, fonts, colors, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes and enables you to edit your post using these styles. ...

Photo Publishing

Writer makes inserting, customizing, and uploading photos to your blog a snap. You can insert a photo into your post by browsing image thumbnails through the “Insert Picture” dialog or by copying and pasting from a web page...Photos can be either uploaded directly to your weblog provider (if they support the newMediaObject API) or to an FTP server.

Writer SDK

 Already thinking of other cool stuff you want to insert into your blog? Good!

The Windows Live Writer SDK allows developers to extend the capabilities of Writer to publish additional content types. Examples of content types that can be added include:

  1. Images from online photo publishing sites
  2. Embedded video or audio players
  3. Product thumbnails and/or links from e-commerce sites
  4. Tags from tagging services

This is one project I've been dying to blog about for months. Since I was responsible for the blogging and the upcoming photo publishing APIs for Windows Live Spaces, I've spent the last couple of weeks working with the team to make sure that the user experience when using Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Spaces is great. I'd like to hear if you think we've done a good job.

PS: The application is not only chuck full of features but is also very extensible. Tim Heuer has already written plugins to enable integration with Flickr and added tagging support. If you are a developer, you should also download the SDK and see what extensions you can hack into the app.