Windows Live Writer (Beta)

I’m post­ing this from inside Win­dows Live Writer, a newly released “weblogging” application by Microsoft. It’s a slick little win­dows app, with sup­port for pub­lish­ing to Mov­able Type, Word­press, as well as Live Spaces, by default.

Paul Sta­ma­tiou has an extended review, but here are some of the features:

• WYSI­WYG Authoring
• Spell Check
• Photo Publishing
• Map Pub­lish­ing, (via Live Local)
• Com­pat­i­bil­ity with Blog­ger, Live­Jour­nal, Type­Pad, Word­Press (and many others)

Also, like most good WYSI­WYG edi­tors, it allows you to toggle over to HTML code view – (taking a quick look at this post, I see that it writes pretty clean code).

Note: There is no sup­port yet for Tags, a new fea­ture in MT 3.3. (Cat­e­gories & Key­words are supported.)

More Infor­ma­tion & Download

UPDATE: Om has a nice review:

It is not often, I say good things about Microsoft prod­ucts, but with this free-​blogging tool, I have to say: write on! …the soft­ware actu­ally lets you use your blog styles for edit­ing, has abil­ity to add plu­g­ins, and has an SDK to extend the func­tion­al­ity of the pro­gram. You can also swap out  Microsoft Maps for say Google Maps.