Windows Live Writer

Switched back to Windows Vista! Why? I'm keen to give Windows Live Writer Beta 2 a test drive and there's currently no Mac OS X client (get your skates on Mac Business Unit (Mac BU)).

Microsoft has built a powerful desktop application blogging tool, which largely precludes the need to directly login to your blog account. Windows Live Writer can publish to Windows Live Spaces, Sharepoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services.

Windows Live Writer is by no means unique. There's an abundance of third party applications and widgets available for both Windows and Mac platforms. Yet, Windows Live Writer goes someway to consolidate rich publishing in one easy-to-use application. Setup is a breeze. However, I'd like to see more formatting options - such as justify - made available from the GUI. Of course you can switch to HTML and, manually, insert code yourself.

You can post directly from within Windows Live Writer or save drafts locally and/or online. A very useful trick it has up its sleeve; updated drafts, saved locally, will overwrite the online draft if you saved at both locations. Therefore you don't need to worry about reconciling different versions or accidentally double posting (a bane of bloggers everywhere)!

The icing on the GUI

Confession time! To my chagrin Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is an excellent product. This upgrade goes far beyond new box art! The Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) have finessed the groundwork in v.X and augmented Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage with "added value".

Most compelling is Project Centre - manage your projects more efficiently by accessing all of your project-related e-mail messages, files, notes, contacts and schedules in one convenient place. It's clearly a work in progress. However, future patches will address this. Encarta® as a reference tool is also worthy of note!

Clearly serious R&D dollars have been spent on the retooling of Office 2004 suite and I'd urge power users to consider it. Yes, there are alternatives including AppleWorks and OpenOffice. But each has its own caveats! Compared to Windows and earlier Mac editions this is the most stable yet - no sign of text rendering/refresh issues that were the bane of its predecessors!