Live Writer Beta 2 has arrived

May 31, 2007

At the beginning of May, I asked if my blogging tool of choice, Microsoft’s Live Writer, was ever going to be developed beyond Beta 1, and it seems that my wish has been granted because yesterday, Beta 2 was released.

Cosmetically, it doesn’t look that much different to Beta 1 - although, the colour scheme and menu bars have been tidied up, making the Live Writer Beta 2 look much slicker than the previous version. Reading through some of the comments at the Live Writer blog, other users have had problems installing Beta 2 over the top of Beta 1, but for me, all of the blog account settings I created before were left intact after installation. I did manage to crash the application by clicking the Manage Weblog button:

but I think this was more to do with Firefox asking if I wanted to restore a previous session. One frustration which has been carried over to Beta 2 is the inability to centre an image by clicking, oh, I don’t know, an icon. For some reason, Live Writer still wants you to specify the margin settings. Until a toolbar icon appears, I will continue to find it easier to switch into HTML view and use the <center> tags around my images.

Previously, when using the Web Preview view, the Beta 1 ignored the Wordpress plugins that I use on my blog, but this version doesn’t, so now I get a much more accurate preview of the posts I’m writing.

The ability to tag posts has been significantly improved. Within Wordpress, I use Broobles’ excellent SimpleTags plugin, which enables me to markup the tags inside a <tags>, </tags> pair, and then creates a “Technorati Tags:” list on the fly. Live Writer Beta 2  does that all for me now and provides a pop-up, which also remembers the tags you’ve used before and does suggests them as you type. You can select from a number of pre-populated tag sites and configure your own choices, too:

The output can be seen at the bottom of this post, which has been done using the improved Live Writer tagging functionality.

Another new feature in the Beta 2 is the ability to add categories. Its omission was something that annoyed the heck out of me in Beta 1, so I’d love to be able to describe it here, but - and I’m super-embarrassed to admit this -  I just can’t find it! The screen capture at the Live Writer blog suggests that the option is available from the pop-up menu where you to select the categories for each post, but it’s not! So, if you’re playing around with Beta 2, and find out how to add categories, please do let me know.

I’ve only used the Beta 2 to write one post so far - fittingly, it’s this one - and already I love it more than the previous version. This is a much better product than its predecessor; it doesn’t feel like beta software anymore, and I’m really pleased that Live Writer team have been quietly improving it in the background. Maybe they’ll actually use it now, and keep their user community updated more often!

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