As I mentioned in my last post, I’m trying Windows Live Writer as a blogging tool. Despite having a really long name that apparently needs to be prefixed with “Windows Live,” Writer is actually a very convenient tool for blogging. This will be a short review covering the positive and negative aspects of the tool.

The OOBE (Out Of Box Experience) is excellent. Setting up live writer to work with my blog was a breeze. Type in the URL of my blog, type in my account info, and I’m set. The account info is saved and automatically used without prompting, which is very convenient. However, security-minded users may not be happy with this feature, as there seems to be no option available to disable saving the password.

The password is saved in the registry under HKCU\Software\Windows Live Writer\Webblogs\<guid>\Credentials\Password. The password seems to be encrypted, but this is no more than weak obfuscation. The password can easily be retrieved by viewing your account details, and getting the contents of a starred-out textbox through the use of my Passfinder utility. Anyone with access to my computer could easily find the password to my blog very quickly. Saving the password is not a crime in itself, but failing to provide an option to disable this behavior is not ideal.

The user interface, however, is very clean and easy to use. There are quite a few tools available, but the interface keeps these out of the way when they are not needed. The editing interface is very standard, with a standard formatting toolbar, standard menus, and a standard status bar. The WYSIWYG editing is done exceptionally well. The initial set-up with a blog site retrieves the style settings and allows you to preview your blog post in the actual style in which it will appear. The edit control appears to be an Internet Explorer hosted control, so what you see is really what you get (Unless you use Opera or Firefox…) At this moment, I am typing text in the actual font used on the blog, with the actual background as well. The title of this entry is displayed on top, just as it will in the real blog, and I can edit the title as if it were just part of the article.

This screenshot brings me to my favorite feature of Writer. Embedding images in my blog post is as easy as cut-and-paste. This is how WYSIWYG editing is supposed to be about. It just works. The screenshot you see above was pasted directly from mspaint, with no intermediate files being saved. The image is automatically updated as a png through the standard blogging APIs. In addition, if your blog does not support uploading images, Writer can use an FTP server instead if needed.

Publishing is quick, easy, and painless. A preview mode can allow you to see your post as it will actually appear on your front page. When you’re ready to save, publishing is a breeze, and can be done with a single click. Saving drafts is also just as easy, and can be posted to the blog as a draft, or saved locally as a draft. Editing existing posts is also easy, and even allows editing posts that were not made in Writer.

My final complaint with Writer is that all of the UI seems to be custom designed. The menus are nonstandard, the toolbars are nonstandard, and the dropdown boxes are nonstandard as well. I would be very surprised if the status bar was a standard windows control. The only standard controls that I can find on the window are the “hyperlink” tools in the sidebar, which in reality are static text controls which change the cursor and underline the font when the mouse hovers.

I understand the reason for using custom designed controls; the custom controls used look nicer than the standard windows controls. However, when the user changes the theme or uses a different version of windows, the common theme will not be used in applications that draw their own controls. This sets a bad example for programmers, who end up doing custom UI like the UI we see in Java applications and GTK applications (Yuck!). I’m of the opinion that native UI is a good thing, and should be used whenever possible.

Overall, I think Windows Live Writer is an excellent blogging tool. It will be interesting to see how Word 2007 with its new blogging features competes with Writer.

Score: 14.5 FooBars (on a 17 point scale)