Microsoft has released a technical preview of their new version of Windows Live Writer.  It has a bunch of new features that you need to check out.  WLW is already the best blog posting software out there (and it’s free!). 

I have listed some of the new features that are in this build but I have to say, the best new feature IMHO, is something that is not even listed in the official release notes.  That feature is the ability to organize your draft posts any way you want on your hard drive and be able to edit them by simply opening them from windows explorer.  I know that might not seem like a huge deal to some people, but I like to lay out my ideas and draft posts in folders and sub-folders based on topics or tags.  In previous versions, if you attempted to load a draft post from any other folder other than the official drafts folder, you would get a new draft post instead of editing an existing one.

Note:  You still cannot manage your draft posts (other than the ones that exist in the official drafts folder) from within WLW.  But I am hoping that this feature will be coming in a future build.

Awesome work WLW Team!

New Features

You’ll also get an early look at some improvements and new features we’ve been working on:

Video and Image Publishing Enhancements

• Upload videos to Soapbox
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Editing Enhancements

• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

UI Improvements

• Revised main toolbar
• Tabs for view switching
• Improved category control with search/filtering

via Charles Teague’s DragonStyle Blog

Brenton House