Windows Live Writer

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1. James
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 2:00 pm

   I use MT for my blog platform. I just downloaded and installed MT Writer. I tried to run it three times and every time it crashed during the set up.

   Screencap: http://blognyc.net/images/livewriter-error.php

   It apparently got as far as putting temporary posts on my site that I had to go back and delete. Here’s a screencap of those:

   http://blognyc.net/images/BlogNYC1155506253625.php

   Anyone else have these problems?

2. Bob Weston
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 2:04 pm

   This product was developed by OnFolio, a company Microsoft acquired. I can’t quite blame MS for ignoring the Mac here, but I can blame OnFolio by choosing to write their products in .NET, clearly to pimp up their acquirability (nice job guys, it worked!)

3. met
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 2:08 pm

   You don’t use bootcamp?

4. Joe Cheng
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 2:14 pm

   [I’m a member of Writer team]

   Just wanted to point out that our WYSIWYG is different than any other desktop blogging tool–we try to accurately reflect the colors, fonts, and other styles of your blog, automatically. I’m sure the other desktop blogging tools will be trying to add that soon.

   We also support opening existing posts from your website (and I think current versions of most other desktop blogging tools do as well).

5. Cameron Kollwitz
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

   Looks like a great piece of software, considering it was only just released. I can’t wait to try it out. I’m thinking of a nice week-long test drive. I’ll post results and thoughts on my blog.

6. Here
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 2:40 pm

   They need to release a mac version or Apple should build one for leopard.

7. Martin Gordon
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 3:04 pm

   Nice, but where’s the ribbon?

8. cooper
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 3:15 pm

   OMG!!!

   A MS product that I’ll actually use. This is fantastic. Now I need someone to break into the Myspace code so I can blog on my blog and have it auto placed on myspace.

9. BPAndrew
   

   August 13th, 2006 at 3:46 pm

   “I can blame OnFolio by choosing to write their products in .NET, clearly to pimp up their acquirability (nice job guys, it worked!)”

   Are you serious? You know some people write applications in .NET because it’s easier and quicker to bring a product to market.

10. Kyle
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 3:54 pm

    As a fellow Mac user, I highly recommend ecto!

11. Raj
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 4:10 pm

    I just spent $40 on BlogJet. Darn.

12. Gloria White
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 4:30 pm

    cool…I downloaded it and it looks very promising.

13. nick
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 4:49 pm

    Very nice program that works well with my Wordpress blog. Apple needs to come up with something better than iWeb to compete with this.

14. Allen
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 5:01 pm

    Ok - Call me an idiot but why would we want a desktop tool vs. some online tool that we can access from anywhere with any computer?

    I bet the 2008 version of office will be BC (blog compliant) LOL.

15. kuju
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 5:01 pm

    great

16. Cherrie
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 5:37 pm

    It won’t recognise my Blogger blog…weird

17. Gus
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 5:38 pm

    Impressive piece of work coming out of Redmond. The product feels much better than other windows based offline bloggers that I have used. This is going to be the product to watch.

18. Bryan
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 5:45 pm

    Honestly, why would Microsoft bother with the Mac? Don’t get me wrong–the Mac’s a fine platform–but if they’re going to expend the effort it’s going to have to either be profitable (e.g., Office) or serve some strategic purpose (e.g., Internet Explorer… I mean Media Player… err). Microsoft’s blogging work seems (remarkably) standards compliant, so I’m reasonably sure Spaces can work with Mac tools; thus there’s no reason to put in the effort. The Mac community as a whole has a rather visceral aversion to all things Microsoft, which is likely a large part of why they’ve been receding from the Mac market–no use catering to a market that really doesn’t want you there. If you want them to share their toys, you’d do well to be a little less snarky.

19. rayk
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 5:47 pm

    This looks like a relly great tool, can’t wait to try it out when I get home. So far I’ve been writing my posts in msword and the copy pasting into the blog (such a time consuming process -__- ).

20. Steve Macdonald
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 6:19 pm

    “Too bad that, like Google and Picasa, Microsoft has ignored the Mac platform”

    Far from ignoring the Mac platform, Microsoft propped Apple up financially and prevented it from going under entirely not too long ago. Micorosft has provided Office for the Mac for years despite the tiny market share, and despite the fact that Apple is a rigidly controlled, closed platform that competes with Windows.

    If anything Microsoft has provided too much support to a competitor. If Apple had decided 10 years ago that they wanted to capture 10-20% of the market and then actually did so then these complaints about lack of Mac support would fall on more non-deaf ears. 4% share just ain’t worth it most of the time.

21. Doug
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 6:22 pm

    Why do we need to download an application? Why isn’t there a Rich Internet Application to do this?

22. Steve Macdonald
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 6:25 pm

    “Why isn’t there a Rich Internet Application to do this?”

    Beacuse “Rich Internet Applications” cannot reproduce even a fraction of the flexibility and power available to a native application. This is why AJAX word processors pose exactly 0% threat to Word.

23. hiyasaki
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 6:29 pm

    Microsoft doesn’t need to port this to mac anymore than ecto or mars edit need to port to windows.

24. bluesaze
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 6:30 pm

    Mac ???? whats that ??? you fan boys need to run bootcamp instead of cribing

25. James
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 6:31 pm

    Is anyone else having problems with it freezing up during the downloading of editing styles? I’ve uninstalled and re-downloaded it. Always freezes at the same place.

    I’m using Movable Type.

26. RJ
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 6:56 pm

    I’m on MT3.2 and Firefox. So, I think I’ll just stick to me trusted PFF1.3 (Performancing for Firefox 1.3).

27. Adrian
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 7:29 pm

    The FireFox based Flock browser includes a very nice blog editor, and supports the Mac as well. It lets me edit my blogger.com blog with easy Technorati tags and much nicer editing options than blogger supports. However I think the Vox.com blog editor is the nicest I’ve seen so far online.

28. ben
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 7:32 pm

    i downloaded and installed this - it’s awesome! works for a blogger site i have and a dasblog site, easy!

29. Shahn Hogan
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 7:41 pm

    Anybody know if iWeb is available or Windows? Hmm, I don’t guess I see why MS should release this for Mac. Windows Live services are geared for Windows. .Mac services are gears for… that’s right Mac.

30. Chris Griffin
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 8:04 pm

    @ Bryan

    Most of us don’t want anything Microsoft has to offer anyway, hence the reason why we are using a Mac in the first place.

    I could go the rest of my life without using any Microsoft product. Microsoft can keep all their products to themselves and release them on Windows only. I don’t want it. Its pretty much a sure thing that anything on Windows is already on a Mac.

    I don’t call that snarkiness, I call it appreciation for a better computer experience. That’s my opinion, and I know its not others because I’ve heard the Mac vs. PC debate way too many times to care to hear anymore about it again.

    Personally I think Microsoft isn’t going to release anymore software for Mac considering we can now run Windows on our Mac. Soon enough, we may not even need windows to run windows applications.

31. Richie
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 8:15 pm

    It looks not bad .

32. Eran Sandler
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 8:41 pm

    I’m using Zoundry Blog Writer, which is actually a great piece of Blog Writer. It supports almost all of the various blogging platform, allows editing existing posts, has a WYSIWYG editor, spell checking, the works.

    It also have built in tagging support, so you can add at the end of any of your posts Technorati, del.icio.us, Ice Rocket and a few other tags.

    You can get it at zoundry and its even free!

    AFAIK, it only runs on Windows, but it is mostly written in Python so I assume there is a reasonable chance of converting it, if enough interest is shown.

    I use it for my two blogs hosted at Blogger and am very pleased about it.

33. Chris Messina
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 8:54 pm

    I’ve been using MarsEdit from Ranchero recently… pretty basic but does what it should. Then before that I was using TextMate and before that I was trying to use Flock. Someday, I hope.

    I’d be interested to see the HTML output of this thing but alas, like you Mike, I’m on a Mac.

    Frankly, if there’s some kind of integration with the RSS platform they’re building into Vista with this thing, they’re doing something smart (even if the UI looks like it came out of Win2K). If not, and it’s a one off app like Wordpad, hell, they should just add the API support to Wordpad and call it WordpadLive. Doesn’t seem like a major announcement to me otherwise.

34. Manish
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 8:59 pm

    The Windows Live Writer folks did a nice job. Also check out RocketPost, http://www.anconia.com/rocketpost. It’s far more advanced than Writer, and there’s a free version. (I designed it.)

35. mpcc
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 9:13 pm

    I checked it out and I like it. fast, easy and responsive. Much better than the blogger and wordpress editors.

36. ventureblogalist
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:04 pm

    This is great and should only get better seeing that the team includes Joe Cheng!

37. Andreas
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:09 pm

    be careful - it crashed my typepad blog and deletes all google ads!? Great tool - but why are my google ads no longer avail? And I even didnt publish anything with the tool - I only setup my typepad blog.

38. Ole Eichhorn
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:12 pm

    With the advent of Intel-based Macs and Parallels, it is a lot less important now for companies to release “Mac native” versions of software. Most sophisticated Mac users have an Intel-based Mac and are running XP in a Parallels virtual machine, so blog posting from that environment is nearly as easy as it would be with a native Mac application.

39. EP
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:24 pm

    Nice tool - and maybe something I will use in the future for my blog…

40. Bryan
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:29 pm

    @ Chris Griffin

    Eh… that was basically my point, albeit with the “technological cleansing” spin. I’m not looking for a geek face-off. I’m merely pointing out that lamenting the paucity of Microsoft software on the Mac–which seemed to be a major point of concern in Michael’s original post–is rather silly in light of the Mac community’s collective stance towards Microsoft. I’m sure Microsoft would love to develop more software for the Mac if they (a) had a valid business case and (b) believed a significant enough people wouldn’t turn their nose up at it without even a look. Like I said, the Mac’s a great platform, and I’m not trying to deminish it. So, uh… no need for chest thumping.

41. Diego Barros
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:40 pm

    I guess with Microsoft now using the word “Live” in all their new releases, it eases the pain on their marketing department to come up with something good.

    There’s a funny bit in this Channel 9 video, where Tony Williams (co-inventor of COM) is talking about a new product they were working on. The codename was xCal, but ended up being “Calendar Printing Assistant for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007″ He says something along the lines of “and marketing named it something horrible like…” and he names the long winded product name. The audience laughs and he rolls his eyes in disgust. It’s at about 48 minutes in. I think it sums up a lot of people’s reactions to some of the naming decisions at Microsoft.

    http://channel9.msdn.com/showp.....tid=224935

42. XYU
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 10:53 pm

    I tried it in my blog based on Wordpress, but when I published a post via Writer, the post disappeared, I can’t find the post in anywhere -frontpage or draft. I checked out database and saw it finally, OMG, its timestamp is 1970!

43. Bryan
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 11:04 pm

    @ Diego Barros

    I saw that video. He refers to the name as “disgusting”, which I think is absolutely right. Most Microsoft software, from an engineering standpoint, is actually pretty good–IE6 notwithstanding. Where they consistently fail is their soulless and tacky branding and marketing.

44. devan
    

    August 13th, 2006 at 11:51 pm

    waited for long time something like this to write blogs faster…thanks

45. other
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 1:13 am

    “Too bad that, like Google and Picasa, Microsoft has ignored the Mac platform.”

    You said something similar on the earthlink weblife post too - is that it that difficult for you to understand that any company, no matter how big or small, is going to go after the lion’s share after the market first (especially with free releases and alphas/betas/previews)??? Why would they basically set themselves up for double the customer support, double the design and manipulation and double the pain on something they have not fully developed yet. You make it sound like they are out to get all Mac owners. Hundreds of companies have spent years “ignoring” Macs. Who cares?

46. Phil
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 1:31 am

    Hey I’ve just started up my own technology blog, please visit it and tell me what you guys think.

    Thanks

    http://www.philipaustin.co.uk

47. Matt Emery
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 3:04 am

    “Since I use a Mac, I won’t be testing this software.”

    Thats a shame, as i’d really appreciate your non-biased review of the software

48. Judi Sohn
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 4:34 am

    “Just wanted to point out that our WYSIWYG is different than any other desktop blogging tool–we try to accurately reflect the colors, fonts, and other styles of your blog, automatically. I’m sure the other desktop blogging tools will be trying to add that soon.”

    The only thing that’s missing is any images that are in the style sheets. For example, I use CSS to style my unordered lists with images instead of dots as the bullets and I have an image in the background of my titles. In Windows Live Writer, my lists don’t have any bullets at all and the title image is not there.

    But I think it’s a really good product and if this is the beta, I can’t wait to see what the finished version will look like. Only thing I could do without is all the Onfolio stuff that comes with the toolbar (yes, I know I could have opted out of installing it). I don’t mind the toolbar (especially since I’m in Firefox 99% of the time), but Onfolio adding to my startup files? Not so much.

49. Dennis Howlett
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 4:55 am

    Certainly can edit posts using Ecto on Mac though it’s not WYSIWYG it gives a decent approximation

50. Dennis Howlett
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 5:23 am

    Question: Mike - are you sure it’s an API not SDK? API suggests it can be hooked to other stuff, SDK is a bit different.

51. Danny
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 6:05 am

    The release is good news, but there is one aspect that bugs me a little. It’s seriously retrograde in its protocol support.

    The blogging APIs based on XML-RPC may be widely supported (albeit inconsistently), but XML-RPC just isn’t very web-friendly. Being tightly coupled between client and server makes it unnecessarily hard to interoperate with and to extend. Codewide it’s a total nightmare to debug.

    The web was designed to be writeable from day one, and at least one browser (Amaya) has supported this capability for a long time. It’s the read-only browsers, notably those from Netscape and Microsoft, which set the expectation that writing is something special. The XML-RPC based APIs are really just workarounds for tools failing to support the HTTP protocol properly - RSS can be used as the payload for GET operations, why should it be necessary to wrap the stuff in a completely unrelated format to POST? (answer: it isn’t).

    Basically I’d suggest XML-RPC is a blind alley, and right now is hindering innovation. To go forward it’s really necessary to go back to the basics and start implementing the standards (i.e. HTTP and XML) in a web-friendly fashion. It’s a shame Microsoft haven’t (yet) had the courage. But they or someone else is bound to take the easy path to web authoring (for fun and profit) soon, especially now the Atom Publishing Protocol is nearing completion.

52. miniplayer.info
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 6:10 am

    I just download Live Writer and figured it out in about 5 minutes - I love it! It looks like I’m going to need to start a blog on my iPod killer site!

    Thanks Bill!

53. Joe Cheng
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 6:50 am

    Danny, APP support will come with the next version. In the meantime, surely you can’t blame us for targeting interop with today’s blogging platforms rather than targeting compatibility with the hypothetical blogging platforms of tomorrow!

    That said, I fully agree. Trying to support MetaWeblog API is an absolute nightmare (damn you, ambiguous time zones!!) and the sooner the world can move on, the better.

54. Tris Hussey
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 7:05 am

    Wow, you decide to not work on a Sunday …

    So a quick word about Qumana … boy Michael you haven’t tried it in a long time … the newest version of Q is wysiwyg, can edit old posts (even ones not written in Q), handles images nicely, one click tagging and more.

    It’s also free and works (and looks the same) on Mac and PC (it’s a Java app now).

55. David Owens
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 7:55 am

    I’ve just set it up with dasBlog, bu the image uploading doesn’t seem to work.

56. Alec Dorling
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 10:05 am

    There is still one product for all to beat Blogjet from http://www.blogjet.com . It works perfectly everytime, has a great user interface and the support is outstanding. You will not find a better and easier product to use.

57. Dmitry Chestnykh
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 11:40 am

    Raj, if you regret about spending money on BlogJet, come on, write to me and get a full refund. But first, please try this product from Microsoft. Then think twice.

58. Dmitry Chestnykh
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 11:41 am

    P.S. Tris, you’re here again

59. Jonathan Cohen
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 11:43 am

    I enjoy using BlogDesk. It’s a rock-solid Windows app that lets you edit previous posts, manage images/thumbnails, and has a Technorati tag generator.

    The few drawbacks: Categories don’t sync automatically with the blog, so you have to sync them manually, and you can’t edit drafts.

    Otherwise, it’s perfect. And it’s free, too.

60. PAStheLoD
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

    This is insane. This program has virtually no use. I’m almost sure, that if this app can detect the blog, so it’s a pretty popular blog engine, then there has to be a WYSIWYG plugin for that engine.

    Every major blog engine supports these and much more, than “this”.. writely or whatever.

    It needs INTERNET to function, doesn’t it? So what can you do with this, that you can’t with your blog software? Nothing.

    So, this program is useless.

    QED ;]

61. RJ
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 6:31 pm

    I’ve just had a look at Live Writer and I must agree with Faisal, Dmitry et al. Nothing, I believe, to rave so about.

    @ Raj, I have used Blogjet for some time and in comparision to LiveWriter, for me, Blogjet wins hands down.

    PPF1.3 was an idle tryout and I just got so used to it, mainly for the fact that it provides for a nifty ’split window’ where you can draft up your blog entry WHILE looking at the tabbed web pages (in Firefox), making hyperlinking a cinch.

    For me,

    1. PFF1.3
    1. PFF1.3
    2. Blogjet

    :)

62. molly
    

    August 14th, 2006 at 8:16 pm

    @Allen
    “I bet the 2008 version of office will be BC (blog compliant) LOL.”

    Actually, Office 2007 is blog compliant. Word 2007 can be used as a blog editor/publisher.

63. Yehudah Goldstein
    

    August 16th, 2006 at 2:23 am

    Funny how Mactards whine about that no Mac version. Ask Jobs boy for iBlog.

64. Saravanan
    

    November 12th, 2006 at 11:07 am

    Nice tool, it reduced lot of my time, I wrote a step by step tutorial to setup writer.
    http://saran945.com/cs/blogs/i.....riter.aspx
    Thanks