Lots of discussion about the Windows Writer Beta this morning so I thought I'd take a quick tour. I've never used a Windows client to post to my blog, being a die-hard Web HTML Editor guy, but I might actually be changing my ways. Windows Writer looks pretty sweet. I'll even use it for this post and see what happens.
Quick Tour Quick Observations:
1) I really like how Writer matches my blog style while editing in Web Layout mode. CSS-derived relative path background images weren't exported, but that's understandable. Changing to full paths might fix that.
2) Save Draft is nice! After saving a draft I closed Writer, re-opened and there was my post in a File-Open listing.
3) Configuring Writer for Community Server went very sweetly. My site is configured for single blog, so pointing to /blog/metablog.ashx got me in the front door.
4) Image handling works very well, both for Web and Local images. All images are fully scalable, support text wrapping, margin settings and various effects. You need to send images to your site by FTP, which worked without a glitch for me. Writer creates a separate folder for each post, which is fine, but this could get a little messy if you like to have tidy storage folders on your site like I do and display a lot of images.
5) Good category support. Spelling checker. Everything worked fine.
6) TextPart and CSModule support, since posting from Writer or from the browser still triggers the same PrePostUpdate(), PreRenderPost() and other global events. Woo-haa!
7) HTML View is much appreciated.
I do hope Microsoft continues working on this product. Nice job, Microsoft Writer Development Team!
Below are a few pics. One working in Web Layout mode, one in Web Preview. Pretty close to the real thing!
[tags: Community Server, Microsoft Writer]