Windows Live Writer is now up to Beta 2. The new look and feel is definitely the first thing you’ll notice, but there are tons of other new features and changes.
And look — auto-save:
Huzzah!
Inline spell checking is sure to be quite popular (I know I’ll be loving it). Folks just dying for tables can now crank ‘em out.
Here’s the rest of the scoop:
| New Authoring Capabilities | Integration and Compatibility | Plus… |
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(yes, that’s a demo of the new table feature. I’m very curious to see how it turns out…)
Lots of good stuff here. If you’re looking for a desktop based blog authoring tool, this is one to try.
I’ve used the previous version quite a bit. I do many of my rough drafts and editing in it, then save it as a draft up to the blog for final touch-ups and tagging (I’ve seen plugins for WLW and tagging, I’ve not yet experimented with any to see how they work with UTW). Since tagging will be part of the WordPress core soon, I’ll just wait a bit before looking for that particular solution.
Ryan of CyberNetNews has mentioned some XHTML validation concerns. In a comment, I’ve asked for more details to see if there’s something in particular to be watching for. With the previous beta, the only issue I had stumbled over was related to hyperlinked images: They all got atomicselection=”true” added to the link. I’ll be curious to see how this post does in validation after I publish it.
[Update: By default, it still adds that attribute. It is easy enough to edit out, but I wonder if I can turn that off somehow...]
One oddity I’ve noticed: The new beta is getting 403 responses when I try to publish (mod_security). That wasn’t an issue with the previous beta. Interesting.
Speaking of Windows Live products, Windows Live Messenger is now up to 8.5 Beta. Again, the look and feel are the big change. Not much else to say but it matches WLW nicely, for what that’s worth.
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May 30th, 2007 
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I was always wondering what the heck atomicselection=”true” meant, since it was causing my pages to fail validation. According to a quick Google search (for which I got about four results), it’s an IE-specific attribute probably related to JavaScript. Strange.
[...] yesterday’s post about the new Windows Live Writer Beta 2 I mentioned that I was getting some HTTP 403’s when [...]
Yup, it is a “microsoft extension” to html. wheee…