New features in Technical Preview of Windows Live Writer

Since the announcement of Technical Preview of Windows Live Writer earlier this  month, I have shifted to this edition and have been using it without any problem. Although it says that this release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK, but there are some improvements and new features also added which a general user of Live Writer will notice. Let us check out these new features:

As soon as you open Live Writer one can notice the revised  Main toolbar

Tabs are provided for Easy View Switching

Search option for search through your categories

 

Upload videos to Soapbox

Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects

Now Support for centering images is provided, I was wondering why this option was missed earlier.

Additional border styles such as Rounded Corners, Reflection and others provided, (here reflection option shown)

 

Image cropping and tilting options provided. These options are very useful.

 

 

The tilt option should also be provided with Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Then there is Word Count providing statistics.

And there is option for Auto Linking which will be quite handy to terms, providing their links automatically. I am not sure if this was there in the earlier version or not.

So these are some of the new features in this version. Remember its a Technical Preview and we will see lot more improvements in the coming versions as they move out of preview. Apart from these features as said earlier its largely about updates to the Writer SDK, which now includes hooks for pre- and post-publish events.These updates are still experimental and these APIs are not stable.

Here are some of the features I would like to see in future versions :

I would also like to see some sort of Search option provided with Writer to Search Drafts and Recently Posted Blog Posts. Although one can Search from the 'My Weblog Posts' Folder where these gets stored as (.wpost files) using Windows Search but if a Search is provided within Live Writer then it will be very handy as the number of posts keeps on increasing as we keep blogging.

Also option to sort the Published posts.

Improvements to toolbar with improved Formatting options.

More options as Wave effects or Torn Effects to image borders.

So if you are using earlier version of Windows Live Writer or if you haven’t used it then give this a try. If you are a blogger then this is a must have. You can download the technical preview of Windows Live Writer from here. You can download the SDK from here. Check the link for more information on SDK.