Live Writer Tech Preview Released

The Live Writer team have released a tech preview of the next version of Windows Live Writer. While the GUI for Wordpress’ editor is certainly improved in v2.5, it still doesn’t beat the power of a desktop app. The fact that while I’m writing this post, it looks like I’m writing it straight on my blog is fantastic for visualising how good/bad/otherwise it’ll come out at the end of the day, rather than having to just “know” or use preview everytime I add an image.

It has a few neat looking features (that are immediately noticeable) such as

• New border effects (reflections, rounded corners, solid 1pixel, solid 3 pixels)
• Support for Lightbox/Lightbox groups! (Via Options under Link on images)
• Quicker access to different “views” of your blog. Down the bottom there are now three tabs, Edit, Preview and Source
• Images can now be centered! Yay!
• Image editing options now include cropping and tilting. While I’m unlikely to use tilting, cropping I’m sure I will. There are always moments where an image is one or two (or 10!) pixels off, and it is much quicker to crop in WLW than it is to load up Photoshop again.

Going from the Live Writer team’s blog entry, most of the changes are related to the SDK, albeit not stable at the moment.

On a negative note however,

• It seems to of changed quotes from being " to “ and ”. A small visual difference, but when copying code examples, means you have to run a search and replace to get any snippets working! Update: As Brandon Turner pointed out in the comments, Tools -> Options -> Uncheck "Use smart quotes" fixes this issue. The Live team is fast to respond!
• You still can’t modify any of the parameters on the border effects. By that I mean you can’t make a drop shadow more subtle, change how strong the reflection is, or even change the colour of the solid 1/3px borders.

I'm sure there are one or two things I haven't noticed at first glance, so by no means take this at a definitive list of new features.