One thing about first impressions is that they always come first, and that’s without exception. With that in mind, my first impression of Windows Live Writer is that it has the slowest installation routine I have ever seen; that’s pretty impressive for something that’s a mere 5Mb in size. It doesn’t garner any points for offering to install a "Live Toolbar" during installation either – that immediately smacks of spyware in my (and most other folk’s) mind. Microsoft, take note: Live Toolbar is a bad, bad choice of words and you of all people should know that. The installation starts with downloading and installing Microsoft’s Live Services, a kind of pre-installer installer which lists the services on offer. Then you select the application you really want which downloads oh-so-slowly and installs at a glacial crawl. Start to finish, installation took around 35 minutes. For a 5Mb app. No, I’m not kidding. Crazy, huh?
The good news is that’s the bad over with.
Windows Live Writer is, in short, a rather jolly good blogpost editor. It can handle multiple blogs, and all the major blog engines with ease, and will even – if your theme is well behaved (Prologue isn’t, but I’m soon going to change that anyhow) supports in-line themed preview so you can see exactly what the post will look like when you send it live. It’s also possible to schedule posts in advance to be uploaded and sent live at a later date. That’s handy if you want to prepare posts for a regular time slot – a Friday Night Special, for example.
I guess the main question though is why use a Blog Editor at all. Almost all blog engines include an inline editor anyhow, and those few times when the ‘net connection is down, notepad is as good a stopgap solution as any.
Unless, that is, like me your preferred browser is Opera, which doesn’t like WordPress’ visual edit box at all. I’m less than keen to install Firefox just to solve this one problem and refuse to touch Internet Exploder with anything less than a 20′ barge pole. How ironic, then, that I’m testing a Microsoft-created blog editor. There you go.
In short, get past the cruddy installation routine and Windows Live Writer is damned good. If you’ve a need for a decent blogpost editor with inline spell checking, draft saving and support for multiple engines, I’d say it’s to one to choose.
