7 Features That Windows Live Writer Needs
Of all the blogging applications I have tried over the past two years that supposedly make writing your blog posts easier, the latest release of Microsoft Windows Live Writer is about the best of them in terms of features, capability and compatibility. It is also free.
Here are seven features I would dearly love to see integrated in to the Live Writer application within the next 24 months.
1. Expanded Functionality From Other Microsoft Products
If Microsoft Office is installed, use some of the functionality from it. Microsoft Word has a better dictionary, a better thesaurus, and better proofing tools than Windows Live Writer, so why not leverage that functionality? Microsoft Excel offers great table layout and charting capabilities. Microsoft PhotoGallery (part of the Windows Live application suite) offers great tagging and browsing capabilities, Microsoft OneNote has powerful note taking and text recognition capabilities.
2. Import Documents
Being able to import a Microsoft Word or OpenOffice document or even an RTF or plain old text file straight in to Live Writer would save several steps. Copying and pasting may lose all or a partial amount of formatting between the source application and Live Writer which is pretty much unacceptable. Being able to import an Excel spreadsheet straight in to the middle of a document or a myriad of other formats would be immensely useful.
3. Take A Tip From Microsoft Word
Stop re-inventing the wheel when it comes to user-interfaces, just steal from Microsoft Word. Put all of the features that you use up front, where you can easily access them. Don’t make the user go looking for them, if you want to change font size, a frequent operation, the font properties need to be on the toolbar, where it gets used, not buried under a cascading menu system. Let the writer change styles easily, or even change all the styles within a post at one stroke, just like Word.
4. Built-In Scripting
A simple built-in scripting language, based around the .NET framework, would see an explosion of plug-ins available for the application that don’t become obsolete overnight the moment a new version of Live Writer is released. It looks like there are a lot of plug-ins available on the Windows Live website but very few of them actually work with the current version of Live Writer.
5. File Handling
The file handling in Live Writer is utterly dire. I want to put in a PDF or a ZIP for download I have to edit the source by hand or use one of the closed source solutions that may or may not work on the current Live Writer version, which may or may not generate ghastly HTML code that completely fails to blend with my blog’s theme. Make file handling a built-in feature of the application so that users do not need to rely on third-party applications.
6. Caching of blog posts
Writers do not always have Internet access. For the sake of productivity, they often shun it! When you’re pretty sure the document on the local hard drive is just as current as the one on the blog, the application should be able to pull it from a local cache and edit that instead of the one on the server.
While you’re at it, go ahead and cache the list of blog posts too, so that the time between deciding to edit or tweak a previous blog post is reduced and the user is not left waiting for the entire list of blog posts to download each time they want to edit one.
7. Different Views
Full screen view? Draft view? Not having either of these options is fine if you write and edit in Microsoft Word or other word processing application that does offer them, but if Windows Live Writer wants to be a contender for blog post editor of choice then it must become a more capable word processor.
Bonus Feature!
8. Synchronized Source Editing
I know it is a blog post writing application and not a HTML text editor, so actually having a fully featured HTML editor in Live Writer does not really make that much sense. But if the user has a HTML editor available on the machine, make Live Writer integrate with that, automatically synchronize the HTML between Live Writer and the HTML editing application such as Adobe Dreamweaver.
And The One Feature That Is Broken – Find and Replace
The find feature feels like something that came from the 1980’s, and there is no “replace” so do not go looking for one. Find frequently “forgets” what you were searching for. You are prevented from editing your blog post with the find dialogue open ala Microsoft Word. It is not possible to find across multiple blog posts or blog drafts, and there is little point anyway because you cannot do a “replace.” Broken. Broken. Broken.
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Joe Cheng [MSFT] said,
May 14, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
Hi, I’m a dev on the Writer team. Thanks for all the great feedback!
1) Expanded Functionality From Other Microsoft Products
The latest release of WLW actually uses Word’s dictionaries for spell checking, though we haven’t implemented thesaurus or other proofing. The other products are harder (in most cases impossible) to leverage but we’re always looking for opportunities to do stuff like that.
2) Import Documents
When copying and pasting, by default we throw out a bunch of formatting on purpose. We thought that most users would want the style of the content to match the style of their blog, not the style of the original document. We try to throw out the formatting that doesn’t matter while retaining the formatting that matters, but obviously that’s very subjective in some cases. If you’d prefer a higher-fidelity paste, you can do Paste Special and select “Keep Formatting” and we’ll take whatever HTML is on the clipboard and drop it straight in. In most cases this’ll be pretty close to the original formatting.
Importing directly from a file would result in fewer steps but the fidelity would generally be worse, as we’d be the ones responsible for translating the data into HTML as opposed to the native program doing it (as happens with the clipboard).
3) Take A Tip From Microsoft Word
There’s a font formatting button on the toolbar in the latest release of WLW. However, we would rather you use Heading 1-6 and Paragraph whenever possible; this way when you switch your blog theme in the future, all of your previous posts will look consistent with the new theme. That’s why we buried the command in previous releases, we were hoping users would learn to live without it. They didn’t…
4) Built-In Scripting
All of the plug-ins on the Windows Live Gallery website should work with the current version of Writer–we’ve never intentionally broken backwards compatibility. If you’ve tried some that didn’t work, please let me know which ones. Also, you might be interested in my Dynamic Template plugin which lets you easily mix C# code with HTML: http://www.joecheng.com/code/DynamicTemplate/
5) File Handling
Where do you currently put these PDFs or ZIP files? FTP them to your server manually? In early releases we pulled this feature because we couldn’t find a place to upload the files to (other than FTP which is not common among our users), as most popular blog services reject most non-image file types. (Now we have Windows Live SkyDrive, it’s possible this feature could come back.)
6) Caching of blog posts
This bugs me too, thanks for the vote.
7) Different Views
Thanks for the feedback. Unchecking “View | Edit using style” (Ctrl+F11) is the closest we have to Draft view right now.
Thanks for the feedback.
Bonus) Find and Replace
Yep, if you notice the current Find dialog has an IE icon in the corner. We got the Find feature “for free” by building on top of the IE editing engine but have never had the chance to do a decent Find/Replace. It’s something we’re hoping to rectify in the not too distant future.
Justin Lloyd said,
May 15, 2009 @ 12:50 am
Joe, thanks for the response. Appreciate you taking the time out of what is no doubt a busy product development cycle to answer a lone user’s gripes.
Often, understanding the reasoning behind the particular implementation of why a feature is the way it is, or why something is harder to do than it first appears certainly helps people to understand the development limitations some teams are in. I didn’t realise that the “find” feature was built on top of Internet Explorer, I guess that would now make sense of “getting if for free” and only occasional usage. Of course, my post is a wish list, not all features wished for by the users are going to be implemented, the Universe will die before software developers can ever make the users truly happy. 