We’re excited to share that Windows Live Writer 2009 is now officially available for download with Windows Live Essentials!

This is the same version of Writer as the release candidate from last month. If you’ve already installed the release candidate you do not need to upgrade at this time.

Windows Live Writer 2009
Version 14.0.8050.1202

Release Highlights (jump to full feature list)

Sharing photos and video
Here are some of the ways that Writer makes sharing photos and video on your blog even easier than before:

Crop, tilt and new photo treatments
Starting with the basics, Writer now has native editing features for photos - like crop and tilt - in addition to improved border treatments. The alignment commands in the toolbar now work with images so it’s easy to select multiple photos and, for example, center-align them. 

To the right is an example of photo that is titled, right-aligned, and uses the “Instant photo” border (HINT: click the photo to see what happens). 

Photo albums
It’s also much easier to insert multiple photos at once as either individual thumbnails or a Windows Live photo album.

Inserting a Windows Live photo album offers you several different album styles to display inside your post. When you publish your blog post, Writer will automatically upload a photo album to Windows Live and link the album in your post to the album on Windows Live. Here’s an example of photo album using the “Scatter” style:

View Full Album

Video
Now you can insert a video from your computer and have it automatically published to either YouTube or Soapbox when you publish your blog. Just like before, Writer will automatically embed an in-line video in your post and publish your video when you publish the post to your blog.

New plug-ins
Also, for those of you who might have missed the release candidate last month, there are new Writer plug-ins available on Windows Live Gallery that you might like:

Full Feature List
In addition to the highlights of this release, here’s the list of all the major new features added since Windows Live Writer 2008:

• New border treatments (including Instant Photo)
• Crop and tilt photos
• Insert multiple photos
• Toolbar alignment commands enabled for images
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Additional spell checking languages: 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 (for supported blogs)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Twitter, Digg and Flickr Plug-ins
• Improved blog account setup
• Lightbox and Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Improved category control: adding categories, type-down filtering
• Tabbed view switching
• AutoLink glossary
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count
• Support for bidirectional languages (like Hebrew and Arabic)
• Tabs for view switching
• Updated look and feel

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

The Writer Team
Learn more about Writer | Send feedback | Get support

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
Learn more about Writer | Send feedback | Get support

We’re excited to announce that Windows Live Writer Beta is available for download today. 

   
Windows Live Writer Beta
(14.0.5025.904)

New Features

Here’s what you can expect to find in this beta:

Image and video publishing enhancements

• Insert videos from Soapbox and YouTube
• Upload videos to Soapbox and YouTube
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles for images (such as reflection and rounded corners)
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Blog authoring enhancements

• Spell Checking in more languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian-Cyrillic, Serbian-Latin, Spanish, and Swedish
• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

Experience improvements

For those of you who downloaded the Technical Preview and have used Writer in the last couple of days, you may have seen a notification to upgrade to the new version only to be directed to http://get.live.com/writer to find that there is nothing new to install.

On Monday (September 1, 2008) the Technical Preview of Writer started erroneously triggering expiration for October 1, 2008.  We have fixed the issue that was causing the false expiration.  While the Technical Preview of Writer will not expire on October 1, you may still see this notification again. 

When you see this notification, click the “Ask Me Later” button and you will be able to continue using Writer without any change.

We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

The Windows Live Writer Team

Members of the Writer team will be at BlogHer ‘08 in San Francisco this Friday through Sunday. 

In addition to roaming around the sessions, we’ll be presenting and leading round-table discussion about Writer at the Microsoft-hosted breakfast series on Saturday from 8:15 – 9:15 AM.  We’re told that in addition to breakfast (of course) attendees will receive SWAG bags that include a bunch of fun stuff such as: Mini Cams, copies of Windows Live One Care (one yr. free subscription) and a few copies of Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, Windows Live and some other stuff.

Feel free to pull us aside or stop by the breakfast series on Saturday and say “hi”. We’re looking forward to meeting and talking with as many of you as we can.

Catherine Heller (Channel 9) interviews Charles Teague (our Dev Lead) on Windows Live Writer.
 
Charles discusses the Windows Live Writer SDK which includes a managed API for extending Live Writer. He demonstrates the Polaroid Picture Plug-in and also shows how to build a "Hello World" plug-in in Visual Studio.

Charles Teague: Building Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

You can now install the latest technical preview of Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer Technical Preview

What you’ll find in this release:

SDK Updates

This release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK, which now includes hooks for pre- and post-publish events. These updates are still experimental and these APIs are not stable--we may make changes based on your feedback that break plug-ins that use these new methods. However, we’re really excited about the new set of scenarios have been unlocked and look forward to hearing feedback from all of you Writer plug-in developers out there.

For more details about the SDK, please see the blog post on Windows Live Dev.

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

Send Feedback

We look forward to hearing your feedback about this release. The following resources are available to you for providing feedback to the Writer team:

• For feedback about the Technical Preview, please use our Windows Live Writer (Beta) Forum.
• For feedback about the SDK, please use our Windows Live Writer Developer Forums.

We hope you enjoy the Technical Preview!

The Windows Live Writer Team

Instructional video demonstrations for how to use Windows Live Writer are now available.  Check them out on Soapbox and YouTube!

1 – Getting Started

2 minutes, 26 seconds
This instructional video demonstration shows how to setup Windows Live Writer to work with your blog and, if you don't already have a blog, how to create a new blog on Windows Live.

2 - Basic Authoring

2 minutes, 16 seconds
This instructional video demonstration shows how to do basic authoring of a blog post using Windows Live Writer.

3 - Pictures, Videos, Maps and Plug-ins (oh my!)

5 minutes
This instructional video demonstration shows how to insert and edit rich content - like pictures, videos and maps - using Windows Live Writer.

4 – Open, Save, Publish and Help

2 minutes, 44 seconds
This instructional video demonstration shows how to open, save, print and publish blog posts using Windows Live Writer. You will also learn about how to get more information and send feedback to the Windows Live Writer team.

5 - Windows Live Writer

11 minutes
This is a single video that covers the all the same content in the videos listed above (1 - 4).

Enjoy!

For those of you who frequently include images in your blog posts and find that you often apply the same settings, there is a convenient feature in Writer that enables you to save those settings as the defaults for all future images. 

How it works

• First, inset an image. 
• Then apply the settings to the image so it look the way you want (for example: change the text wrapping to "Right" and apply the "Photopaper" border).
• Then click on the "Save settings as default" link at the bottom of the Image Properties sidebar (as shown on the right).

Now, the next time you insert an image it will be using the settings that you just saved following the steps above.

Settings that get saved

Not all settings get saved when you use this feature.  Settings that will be saved are:

• Text wrapping
• Margins
• Borders
• Link to
• Image size
• Watermark effect

Defaults per blog account

The defaults are saved uniquely for each blog account.  That means if you have Writer configured to multiple blog accounts you can specify settings for images that are unique to each account. 

Revert to default settings

And for those of you who tend to get a little crazy formatting your images and take it a little to far, it's easy to wipe the slate clean and start over by clicking "Revert to default settings" at the bottom on the Image Properties sidebar.  This will remove any changes that you've applied to the image and set it back to whatever the images defaults are for that account.

Get back to the defaults that came with Writer

If you changed the image setting defaults for your account and want to change them back to the defaults used by Writer do the following:

• Set "Text wrapping" to "Left"
• Set "Margins" to "No Margins"
• Set "Borders" to "Drop Shadow"
• Set "Link to" to "Source"
• Set "Image size" to "Small"
• Remove any watermark effects
• Click "Save settings as default"

Here's some live footage from the Microsoft Windows Experience Lounge during the 2008 BlogHer Business Conference.  Thanks Sara Ford!!

One correction to the video: Writer is not in Beta anymore.  You can install the official "out of beta" version at http://writer.live.com/.

Live From the Microsoft Windows Experience Lounge

The Picasa Data API newsgroup has reported they have fixed the issue that was causing posts that contain images to not publish on Blogger (thanks Jeff Fisher for the quick response!).  We have verified that the fix does addresses the issue Writer was having publishing to Blogger.

If you continue to have problems with Writer please post on our newsgroup.

Thanks to everyone for their patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

Today, the Writer team learned of changes to Blogger that cause Writer to fail when publishing posts that contain images.  When attempting to publish a post that contains images, Writer will show the following message:

We're currently investigating a fix for this issue and will post an update as soon as we have more information.

Thanks to everyone who reported this issue.

Today we will be starting to distribute the final version of Windows Live Writer as an Important update on Microsoft Update. This means that users of Windows Live Writer Beta 2 and Beta 3 will see the update available in Microsoft Update, or have the update automatically installed if they have opted to have Important updates automatically installed.

You can learn more about the update here. If you are a Beta 2 or Beta 3 user and you aren't seeing the update, make sure that you have opted in to Microsoft Update. Of course, you can also just download and install the final version of Writer directly, if you'd like.

Windows Live Writer Final is the same Writer that you know and love, but with the final fit and finish applied. Thanks everyone who used a Beta version of Writer—we hope you like the final version.

Thank you to everyone who tried out the beta releases of Writer over the last year and gave us feedback. Over 1.5 million of you downloaded our last beta release, and your input helped make Writer the product it is today. 

Our goal from the start has been to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone. Today, we’re proud to announce that Windows Live Writer 2008 is now available!

 
Windows Live Writer 2008 (version 12.0.1366.1026)

Most of our work over the last few months has been focused on raising the quality of Writer and putting the final fit and finish on the product. However, there are still a few new features in this release to check out: 

Easier Spaces creation and configuration
Whether or not you already have a blog on Windows Live Spaces, now all you need is a Windows Live ID username and password to configure Writer to your Spaces blog.

Spell checking in four languages
This includes three flavors of English dictionaries:

1. English (US, UK, Canadian)
2. French
3. German
4. Spanish

Generic AtomPub Support
Configuration and publishing to services that implement Atom Publishing Protocol 1.0.

We have heard from many of you about the pain and frustration in the last beta release when support for installing on x64 systems was not supported.  We're happy to share that this has also been fixed and now installation on Windows Vista x64 is fully supported.

As always, we're eager to hear feedback and learn about what you like and what you don't like.

Later this week you'll have an opportunity to tell us in person. Members of the Writer team will be attending BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas.  We’ll have a product booth with this release of Writer for all to try. Come by and chat with us!

The Windows Live Writer Team

Talk to us
Send feedback
Contact support

Later this week member of the Writer team will be attending BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, NV.

You can find us hanging out at our product booth.  We’ll have a computer with the latest version of Writer available for “test drives”.

We’re looking forward to talking with folks and hearing what you think about Writer.
If you’re planning on going to the conference, please stop by!