Late last year I posted about my first impression of Windows Live Writer — to summarize, I was pretty impressed. I’ve used it numerous times over the last 6 months to write and post entries to the blog and it has worked very well for me.
Microsoft has released a Technical Preview with some pretty snazzy new additions. Frederic @ The Last Podcast has already covered the best ones:
1) Improved Category Control (now you can search)
2) Word Count
3) Auto Link Glossary (auto adds links to popular terms that you’ve previously linked to, like FriendFeed)
4) Lightbox support (if your site uses lightbox)
5) New image controls (like tilt)
I was already impressed with Windows Live Writer and these new features seal the deal. Tip of the hat to Frederic for posting about the Technical Preview and thereby bringing it to my attention.
I’ve tested out Flock before, but only briefly. I’ve decided to give it a more in depth try and see if I can get to like it. Flock is built off of the Mozilla engine, but it is tailored to a more social crowd.
I do like the people sidebar and the post to blog feature. In fact, I am using Flock’s built in blog editor to write this. I did a screenshot of the Flock logo with the Vista Snipping Tool and pasted into this post (which prompted me to upload to Flickr and the slapped it in the post). That’s pretty cool, but I would rather host images for blog posts on my site rather than through a third party. That’s a personal preference, but I think it should be an option. I would have used the drag and drop feature, but their logo has some transparency going on that would have looked like crap on my blog.
I see tags, but no support for categories. Scratch that, after I hit publish, it prompted me to pick my categories. Now my complaint is that you can’t strike through text using the GUI, I had to edit the source. There is an option to turn off the “blogged from Flock” footer, but I have left it on for this post.
Honestly, I don’t know how often I will use the Flock’s built in editor as I like Windows Live Writer and the WordPress interface, but I like having the option.
We will see if I can stick with it a week and whether or not I still like it then. So far, so good.
