I was reading through my AZGroups Digest from Monday and Tim Heuer's post about a new tool Windows Live Writer caught my eye. I've used Qumana, another blogging client, and really liked it and I've recently written about Word 12's features. When I installed Vista Beta 2 a while back I lost the use of Qumana as it seemed there were some Java compat issues. I've recently been going to my blogs and posting through the standard interfaces (a real pain in the back). When I viewed Tim's detailed blog post on WLW I was struck by a number of really cool things he's doing with the SDK and some of the features he reviewed.
I'd like to see task tray functionality to quickly access and manage accounts, drafts, existing posts and "yes" for creating new posts. What I've noticed of myself is that I use these desktop clients as scratch pads when I'm working throughout the day and as a result I've ended up writing and posting more often. Task tray context menus put this type of stuff at a clicks reach. It'd be cool if WLW could use Office's Proofing functionality (spelling and grammar) - perhaps as a provider; don't know what they're using now. I found that Word did a better job, of course, at finding grammar problems. Only one (1) - really :).
I like the WLW option of persisting drafts to the blog itself; Word 2007 and Qumana also have the feature. You can access and review existing blog posts from the client again as with other clients. The Web Preview feature is real cool; something I don't think any of the other clients I've used have. The most compelling feature, however, is the .NET SDK extensibility that WLW offers. I'd like to think that this type of simple extensibility's gonna be available from Word 12 (RTM), but we'll see. WLW's certainly promising; the battle of the MS teams is on now... ;-) It's funny how we have another example of similar functionality coming out of two/more different teams at the Mothership. "hmm - Synergy..."
BTW: this post was written using WLW.
One last thing: loosely related, I found a cool Office 2007 OneNote feature today. Hold down the Windows Logo button and click "s" (Windows Logo+s). This brings up the Office 2007 OneNote screen clip feature that lets you drag and select a region of the screen that will be captured to OneNote/clipboard. The related part of this tid-bit is that, with Tim's Flickr4Writer plug-in, you can save the image to Flickr and then use the plug-in's "Insert Flickr Image..." feature to include it in your post.
