When I was installing my machine with vista, I installed Windows Live Writer as well. I was quite surprise when started a blog post, and It asked me to update to release version. Yes, the live writer that I had is beta, and now this guy was released already. And the best of all, it’s still free and hopefully forever free .

Live writer makes my blogging even easier. I can attach and resize the picture, and do rich formatting directly without using additional plug in.

A few criticism for this release are:

• The wizard only shows Sharepoint and Livespace blog as default blogging connection. If I use Wordpress than I have to choose “other” and proceed to Wordpress option after that. Even though the wizard is smart enough to find my setting, but put the mainstream Wordpress under “other” is sound too marketing instead of technical. But this writer is very smart to detect the Wordpress and Blogspot setting anyway.
• There are a lot of mainstream .Net based blogging engine such as Community Server, BlogEngine.Net, and Dasblog. But all of them never mentioned in the wizard, even under “other” category. Of course I can do manual configuration as long as I know the xmlrpc address of each blogs. But leaving the main blogging player in .Net community is a tragic marketing decision . Maybe Rob Howard need to approach the Live product group to include Community Server under the wizard.

There are some additional small application that come together with this release. They are Live Mail, Live Photo Gallery, Live Messenger, and Live one care. The Live Mail is better comparing with Windows Mail or Outlook Express. But the Live Photo Gallery is a bit disappointed, I even couldn’t figure out how to create a photo tag in an easy manner. Picasa from google is still better.