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!
I had to replace my cell-phone last week after my trusty SPV C600 died; Orange don’t stock the C600 anymore, so I was given an SPV E650 as a free upgrade - now, I know what you’re thinking, “Dude, it was free, stop complaining!!!!”.
Even though I knew I would have to replace my existing 2gb mini-SD with a micro-SD card; that I’d have yet another power adapter to add to the collection; that my FM transmitter would be rendered useless because the E650 doesn’t have “normal” headphone socket; I was expecting the E650 to be a better user experience than my C600. Sadly, despite the free upgrade, this has not been so; to whit:
I’ve yet to have a day without a crash - that includes recoverable errors (the ones that generate an MS error report) from Comm Manager, Calendar, the messaging applet, and non-recoverable errors (which don’t even respond to the power button, so I have to take the battery out). And on one intensely frustrating day, all of the above within about 2 hours.
If that wasn’t enough, I can’t install the GMail Java client (which worked just fine on my C600) because of a certificate error; Efficasoft’s GPRS monitor installs but doesn’t appear on the Home screen, or monitor GPRS usage (and it worked just fine on my C600).
Wireless almost works - I’ve tried it on two APs; one which is wide-open and one which isn’t, and the results were the same. I get an IP address, but can’t browse out so the phone resorts to GPRS.
Application installs take forever - seriously; 25 minutes with the rotating Trivial Pursuit pie-icon.
Sliding the keyboard out and then back in hangs the phone.
This thing is so bad it’s practically unusable. There are so many things wrong, that I’m actually beginning to wonder if I’ve got a faulty unit… Am I alone in my growing hatred of this device? If you’re an Orange customer, and you’ve got an E650, I’d love to hear if your experience has been the same as mine; even better, if your experience was the same and you found a way to fix it, I’d especially love to hear from you.
I’m wondering whether it’s time to change the tool I use for drafting my blog posts offline. I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer beta since it was released in mid-2006, which when it was released, generated a lot of surprisingly positive buzz in the usually anti-Microsoft blogosphere.
Being a beta version, it’s not without its quirks - it doesn’t allow you to add new categories, for example; and displaying my categories as one long, drop-down list is annoying - but, for off-line drafting and editing of blog posts and off-line web preview, I haven’t found anything quite as good.
Live Writer was released at a point in time when Microsoft seemed to be catching the blogging bug in a really big way, which is why I’m surprised and little disappointed that the development of a potentially great app seems to have tailed off. The Spaces page for Live Writer hasn’t been updated since November 2006 when then last update to the beta was released, and searching for Live Writer at Microsoft.com shows that it doesn’t even have its own home page:
Even the activity on the Live Writer MSDN forum seems to have dried up - which, I’m guessing, is because people are losing interest in an application that isn’t being - or, doesn’t appear to be - actively developed.
What do you think? Do you use Live Writer, or do you prefer alternative products that allow for off-line editing? What do you use to update your blog?
This video popped up on YouTube in the week, and although I’m pretty sure that some of the features and services will never be available, its interesting to see where Intel thinks the future for the UMPC might lie:
Whereas, the pitch for the Origami was very much along the lines of a single device-type you’d have to throw in a backpack (or, Heaven forbid, a “man bag”), the next incarnation of the UMPC may take the form a number of smaller, connected devices. (I’m not sure I’d ever vibe on the glowing communicator bracelet thing, but I like the idea of the Inspector Gadget watch.)
The adoption of Origami has been spectacularly underwhelming and the Pocket PC is as good as dead. Providing smaller form-factor, interconnected, devices might just save UMPC. Why? Because people simply don’t want to carry a brick around with them all the time.
Cell phones, especially the Windows Mobile models, are turning into the kind of devices that UMPC aspires to be. Sure, there will be times when I curse the size of the screen, but I’ve got my calendar; I can takes pictures; listen to music; watch video; use GPS; surf the net; get my email. Oh, and it makes calls too. All of this on a device that fits in my shirt pocket. Now that’s Ultra Mobile.
There’s been a lot of buzz about Twitter in recent weeks - fueled by A-listers like Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte (although Leo has recently jumped ship to Jaiku - and I’m still not sure I really understand why), and although it’s been fun watching mainstream media try and get their heads around “the point of Twitter”, the best description I’ve seen yet came from fellow Twitterer, artistx:
Until Twitter I was only half alive! I only lived my life - now I share in loads of people’s lives. Seeing other perspectives - like reading hundreds of short novels every day. On the downside I haven’t done any work for weeks.
I just love the image created by the notion that each “Tweet” is a short novel. When explaining to people why I like Twitter, I’ve found that rather than try and verbalise what it’s about, it’s better to grab them by the scruff of the neck and shove them face first into the stream of consciousness that is Twittervision. It is, literally, like reading other peoples thoughts.
The other day on Twitter, Chris Pirillo posted a link to a video blog called “Hometown Baghdad”.
I’ve got to honest here; if the link had been “in the full”, I probably wouldn’t have clicked through - I would have reckoned on it being more mainstream-media-sanitised, “See it’s not all that bad, is it?” reporting but a) it was linked by Chris, and b) it was in TinyURL format. As it turned out, I clicked through into Episode 1, and was hooked.
Hometown Baghdad is an honest, no-frills, but all-too-brief glimpse into the everyday life of a group of everyday Iraqi twentysomethings who have had their lives interrupted by the war.
As with the previous episodes, the latest from Hometown Baghdad, “Symphony of Bullets“, is both moving and uplifting; moving because of the sense of what now passes for normal life in Baghdad; uplifting because despite the gunfire, humour still shines through.
I try not to blog about politics here - it’s too easy for things to dissolve into a “push me; shove you” argument - but maybe its time for the world’s media to pull out of Iraq, and let normal Iraqis tell their own stories. Perhaps one day, the coalition soldiers will simply have nothing left to do.In the meantime, if you subscribe to one new blog today, make it this one.
May 31, 2007 
Posted in blogging, software 
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