Published September 18, 2008 Windows Live Writer
I’m about 14 hours late with this blog post—at noon today, we officially released the first beta of the Windows Live “Wave 3†client suite, and that means a new release of Windows Live Writer. It’s all available—for free, of course—at http://download.live.com.
For a list of the new features in this release, you’ll want to refer to the official Writer blog post. Personally, I’m really excited about the new look and feel—whereas the old Writer skin called a lot of attention to itself, the new skin just gets out of the way and lets you focus on your content.
Under the covers, a ton of bugs have been fixed, in many different areas across the app. If you’ve had trouble with a previous version of Writer, I’d encourage you to try again with the new beta, and if it still doesn’t work, be sure to let us know in our forum.
On a sour note, we found a new bug last night that causes blog configuration to fail for certain (mostly less-popular) blog types. When blog configuration is almost finished, a crash occurs and you’re unable to complete the blog configuration wizard. We’ve spent today taking steps to mitigate the problem, so hopefully most people won’t encounter it. If you do happen to see a crash in the blog configuration wizard, restart Writer and try again. If it still happens, leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you.
Thanks—and keep the feedback coming!
Published July 29, 2008 Windows Live Writer
Every once in a while we hear from a user that text renders smaller in Windows Live Writer than it does in the browser. We tried numerous times to get to the bottom of the problem, which we suspected had to do with the Text Size setting in Internet Explorer, but no amount of tweaking in IE options made a difference.
Thanks to Noah Coad and some friendly folks on the IE team, the mystery is solved.
What’s going on here is that there is a registry key that defines the default text size for IE6 and earlier. IE7 kept the old key for embedded browsers but uses a new one for full instances of IE. Some apps (like Product Studio, an internal MS app) change the regkey without setting it back. The result is that embedded browsers across your PC now look wrong, and there isn’t an easy way to fix it since embedded browsers don’t usually present a text size option.
See his blog post for the solution. You can just click “Download the Reg Fix†if you don’t feel comfortable mucking with the registry yourself.
Published June 3, 2008 Plugins , Windows Live Writer
The Technical Preview release of Windows Live Writer has only been out for a day, but a few intrepid programmers have already released plugins based on the new SDK features.
Our Windows Live MVP, Scott Lovegrove, wrote up a nice tutorial on writing PublishNotificationHooks and HeaderFooterSources. He also unveiled a slew of new and/or updated plugins—including Now Playing, signature, and profanity checker—all of which use the new plugin types.
Tim Heuer of Flickr4Writer fame popped out a Creative Commons footer plugin. As usual for Tim it’s slick and polished.
John Papa redid his DotNetKicks (like Digg for .NET programmers) plugin as a footer plugin. He’s got two separate posts [one, two] on the subject. The DotNetKicks plugin is a perfect example of a plugin that was impossible to do gracefully under the old SDK, but trivial with HeaderFooterSource.
We also shipped two sample plugins as part of the Tech Preview SDK. They’re primarily intended to be code samples, but as plugins they’re also quite suitable for everyday use.
Twitter Notify makes it easy to tell your Twitter followers that you’ve published a new blog post.
DiggThis automatically inserts a DiggThis badge or button into every post. You get a couple of options for style and placement.
To install the samples, download the Tech Preview SDK, and copy the two *.dll files from the Samples directory to C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins.
In the Tech Preview release, we rewrote the category picker to work better for two kinds of bloggers:
People who have lots of categories Keyboard lovers
For those who have lots of categories, there’s a filter box at the top. Fairly self explanatory. But the keyboard shortcuts are a little less obvious.
Launch category picker: Ctrl+Shift+C
Dismiss category picker: Escape
Focus starts in the filter text field. While you’re in there, you can use the following shortcuts:
Move selection up: Up-arrow
Move selection down: Down-arrow
Check/uncheck currently selected category: Enter
Check currently selected category, and dismiss: Ctrl+Enter
(For Windows Live Spaces and other blogs that only let you choose one category per post, Enter behaves the same as Ctrl+Enter.)
The idea is that you can hit Ctrl+Shift+C, type the first couple letters of the category you want, up/down if necessary, and then Ctrl+Enter. Much smoother than the old workflow: grab the mouse, scroll around, click the category, and then click away to dismiss. And if you prefer the old workflow, hey, you can still do that.
Published May 29, 2008 Plugins , Windows Live Writer
Good news for those of you hungry for new Writer bits: Windows Live Writer Technical Preview is now available for download.
Official announcement: Windows Live Writer Technical Preview
And for developers: Windows Live Writer Technical Preview SDK
We’re calling this a Technical Preview release because the primary reason for it is to gather feedback on some enhancements to the SDK we’ve made. (The Tech Preview is available in English only, but don’t worry, the other languages will be back later in the release cycle.)
That said, there are a bunch of nice features and significant bug fixes thrown in. You can read about the new features on the official blog post, and as far as bug fixes, here are just a few of my favorites:
WYSIWYG editor no longer munges <object>, <embed>, or (most) <script> elements WYSIWYG editor now uses literals instead of escape sequences for most characters (apparently this was causing a lot of pain for some European language bloggers) Dragging and dropping one image thumbnail on top of another image thumbnail no longer causes them to show the same image when clicked More reliable configuration for Blogger users
And here’s one lowlight:
Switching between Normal and Web Layout mode got more confusing for existing users. Both modes are represented by the Edit tab; you can toggle between them using View | Edit Using Theme.
Please try it out and let us know what you think, preferably at our new Beta forum. Thanks!
Published May 18, 2008 Plugins , Windows Live Writer
Here’s a first crack at a plugin for Windows Live Writer that lets you easily insert screen captures into your blog posts. You can capture a window, a rectangular region, or the whole desktop. Sort of like the Snipping Tool in Vista, but without the ability to capture free-form regions, and minus the annoying red border.
Note that for capturing a window or the whole desktop, (Alt+)PrintScreen and Paste work just about as well.
Later this week, I’ll write an installer and put it on the Gallery. In the meantime, just download the file below to your C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins directory.
Download Now [skydrive.live.com]
Update 5/19/2008: Wow, this UI is so much better than mine. I’ll be back.
Published April 25, 2008 Photography
I love photography. And I’m not afraid to admit that I also love photo gear. My family has long since figured that out, and I recently celebrated a milestone birthday (hint: it begins with a 3).
Bring on the glass!
My brother surprised me with a Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8. So far, I’m thrilled with this lens. I’ve always read that a 60mm macro is not ideal for shooting insects, but for flora and portraits, it’s wonderful. Sharp, contrasty, colorful, and a nice balance of heft and compactness. At $370, it’s a decent value if not quite a screaming bargain.
The ubiquitous Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D is a bit sharper and a true bargain ($110!), but I often find myself hitting the minimum focus distance with that lens—not a problem on the Micro-Nikkor, that’s for sure!
All of the following are directly off the card—no edits other than RAW to JPEG conversion (courtesy of Lightroom) and one crop. My wife shot the second and fourth ones. She’s quickly surpassing me in her photographic abilities.
I often hear it said that great photographs are the product of great photographers, not great equipment. That may be true, but boy, having a D300 and a Micro-Nikkor 60mm sure helps a lot!
The other new lens I received was the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 super-wide. More on that later, after I get the chance to take some decent shots with it.
Published April 24, 2008 Uncategorized
I recently realized that this blog has become little more than a place for Windows Live Writer announcements and tips. The last seventeen posts—I just counted—have been about Writer.
While I’m happy to share this information, I didn’t start this blog to be just a Writer knowledge base and news page. I started it because I wanted my own blog, and I intend to start treating it as such. So get ready for the signal-to-noise ratio to drop!
Published April 23, 2008 Blogger , Windows Live Writer
Several users in the Windows Live Writer forums have reported seeing “Error 400: Bad Request†when publishing to Blogger with images:
This happens when some values are missing from your Windows registry—specifically, the content types of .jpg, .gif, and/or .png extensions. I don’t know exactly how they are getting removed, but it’s almost certainly a buggy uninstaller from some other application.
In any case, you can fix this problem by running this .reg file. No need to reboot or restart Writer.
Published April 15, 2008 Windows Live Writer
Update 7/30/2008: Added more steps to the instructions to get Firefox to re-read install.rdf.
Since the first release of Windows Live Writer, we’ve had a Blog This add-on for Firefox. Currently it’s marked as compatible with Firefox 1.5-2.0, which means beta versions of Firefox 3 won’t load it. Turns out it works fine with Firefox 3 as well, if you mark it as such:
Start Notepad Open this file:
C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\BlogThis\Mozilla Firefox\install.rdf Change the line
<em:maxVersion>2.0+</em:maxVersion>
to
<em:maxVersion>3.0+</em:maxVersion> Rename install.rdf to install.rdf.gone Exit Firefox, if it’s running Start Firefox Exit Firefox Rename install.rdf.gone back to install.rdf Start Firefox
(Steps 4-9 are necessary to get Firefox to pick up the changes in install.rdf.)
When we get the chance, we’ll update the add-on so this isn’t necessary.
If you encounter any problems using Blog This with Firefox 3, please let me know in the comments.
I’m about 14 hours late with this blog post—at noon today, we officially released the first beta of the Windows Live “Wave 3†client suite, and that means a new release of Windows Live Writer. It’s all available—for free, of course—at http://download.live.com.
