We’re excited to announce the release candidate of Windows Live Essentials which includes a new version of Writer that is available for download today.

 Windows Live Writer 2009 (Release Candidate)
Version 14.0.8050.1202

New Features
Here are the new features available in this version:

• “Instant photo” border treatment
• Insert multiple photos
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Spell checking in: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (support coming soon to WordPress.com and BlogEngine.NET)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Improved blog account setup
• Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Support for bidirectional languages
• Updated look and feel

New plug-ins
Accompanying this release are three new Writer plug-ins that will be available for download from Windows Live Gallery:

FLICKR UPLOAD
Uploads an image to your Flickr account and inserts an inline picture into your post.

DIGG THIS
Automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

TWITTER NOTIFY
Automatically generates a TinyURL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

Since this is a release candidate we’ll be using your feedback to work through any last remaining bugs before we do our final release.

As always, we can’t wait to hear what you think.

The Writer Team
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