Today has been one of my irregular “update all my software” day. First up was the new Live Messenger (MSN).

I don't think I like it! Ok so some of it looks nice (I like the fact you can have the avatars of your friends displayed) but the text is HORRIFIC! They seem to have used a kind of futuristic bubble font and then put a light glow behind it. The end result is that everything is blurred!

That said it is kinda nice looking... :P

Anyway with it came the latest beta of Windows Live Writer (the blogging tool). I’ve used it on and off for the various blogs I’ve written and it has come a long way from when I first used it!

Some of the things I like about this new beta:

  • It does it’s best to work out the design of your blog to display an offline preview
  • It has recognised my blog (in the past it has hated Wordpress – as do I!)
  • It’s VERY simple to use and means you can write blogs offline and just hit publish when you make it online!
  • The interface is neater than it was before
  • SPELLCHECKER!!!!
But there is some bad....
  • It doesn’t recognise my design properly – so the offline preview is essentially useless
  • Interface is still buggy
  • The writing and html creation is, as with all software like this, crap.
That last one is a killer – I keep having to go into the source tab to edit the html directly; and I am still not 100% confident that it is going to turn out ok when published (watch out for an edit).

So the jury is still definitely out – perhaps I will give it a try for a few days (especially as it tends to encourage me to blog more!). However I fear that I will be heading back to editing posts online in the very near future….

EDIT: yep it screwed up the formatting (html) big time. And randomly added tags into the middle of the post! Plus it didnt tag it: which is how I sort this blog.. so it is, once again, useless for me :(