Finally, the much anticipated next release of Windows Live Writer is here. The Writer release it seems was coordinated with Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail v.Next betas.
Writer's new UI experience is apparent from the Vista Glass-like splash screen. Some of the welcome product improvements include:
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Improved WYSIWYG editing
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Table editing for layout
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Inline spell checking
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Local/online sync - I've had issues with this in the past
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The ability to add RSS tags/categories would be cool. Funny, though, I'm not able to add them as shown on Writer Zone. The screen cap below shows what I'm getting.
You can learn more and download Live Writer here. Though, Live Writers extensibility seems more focused and easy to do I'd like to see Word (out of the box) provide more fully baked blogging functionality: flickr4writer/tags4writer-like functionality and direct HTML editing (even if verbose) would go a long way. I'll continue to use Live Writer as my primary blogging tool but all-in-all the release isn't earth shattering. Oh - and by the way, all of my current Live Writer plug-ins continue to work (nice). My overall take - definitely download it.
So I look out and Tim's already drafted a new Writer extension for subtext. Some more good stuff..
As for Live Messenger: call me a simple but I like the new Vista-like skin. I haven't yet found any new features of note - but I'll keep my eyes open. I would have liked to have seen things like tabbed and dockable conversations and the like but - perhaps we'll see something at release. Ok - now I'm even more interested in getting my hands on the new Yahoo! messenger. I know that isn't the reaction the Mothership wanted to elicit with this release but - well... Here's a snip of the new UI (buddies names obfuscated, of course, to protect the not so innocent).
Live Mail, though I've not yet downloaded the new beta, seemed not all that helpful for me as I'm an Office/Outlook 2007 user. I had two issues with the prior beta: 1) live contacts didn't sync with my Outlook contacts (this is a big one for me) and 2) Though I like the tight integration with Hotmail, I use Outlook for work (Exchange) and SMTP email accounts and I don't like to use two clients. I'd like to see a tighter experience with the premier client (Outlook). To be fair though, I need to download it and try it out.
So in recap: the two releases were good but very cautious. No need to elaborate on the fact that I'm a big Microsoft proponent but this triple-releases' product backlog (Scrum-terminology ;-)) seems to have been driven by the Risk analysis team. Come on Live team - let's get some balls or point out to management that more resources are needed. There are huge expectations in this space. I speak only for myself here, but I know this was a widespread sentiment: I was expecting that with the Live initiative roll-out and early small releases that we'd get small but regular functional tidbits. Perhaps "shame on me" for working up my expectations. However, after getting months of Live Writer daily digests: with no real feedback on upcoming features this drop was light. Perhaps communicating what the release schedule is, and it can be done without hard commitments to the community, expectations wouldn't be so steep. Hell what am I saying, they should be steep!