So, Microsoft release Windows Live Writer this weekend, and all I really need to say is: Wow, go get this, it could be a home run.

I’m typing up this post using Writer, and not only did it work automatically with my WordPress blog … it automatically downloaded my “style” so that I’m actually editing this in a WYSIWYG editor that shows what it will look like on my front page (right down to the ridiculously narrow column).  And the “preview” button made me think it had actually posted it to my blog, very impressive. Some people are already saying it may be better than BlogJet ;(which costs $40).

It works with Windows Live Spaces, of course, but also with RSD, metaWeblog API, and Movable Type API, which means it works on Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and WordPress … to name a few. It also generates very good looking XHTML!

On top of all that, it has a really good looking API which should result in Flickr (and YouTube) plugins, as well as Technorati tagging … faster than you can shake a stick.

They’ve already included image uploading and tweaking, including wrapping text around images, and a mapping feature which lets you embed maps (from local.live.com, of course) toggle details like roads, add pushpins with popup photos and more.

However, there’s still some significant missing features, and a few things that bother me as a user of WordPress, in particular.

First of all, although I appreciate the effort they went to to pull my style sheets and get the layout right, as in this case, my front page generally only shows part of an article … so what really matters is what this will look like in the “single post” template. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way they could pull styles from a “permalink” page, as well as the front index page.

Secondly, the font styles leave a little to be desired: I’d like to see some of the CSS classes pulled from my style sheets to be applied to text from that silly drop down (which currently just offers heading styles). That way I can highlight like I did the last sentence of the previous paragraph, but without manually adding the span tags — and without ending up with a bunch of style and color codes hard-coded into each post (the highlight class is part of my themes, and would therefore change across all posts if I change color styles).

I also don’t understand why the image selection dialog specifies .gif and .jpg but not .png, especially when the software evidently supports them. On top of that, the image uploading thing “crashed” on me twice: once when I selected a file with an image extension that wasn’t really an image, and again when I tried to remove an “effect” from the image thumbnail.  Now, it actually recovered in both cases, so it didn’t really crash, it just popped up an unhandled exception dialog … so it really is beta software .

Of course, as a WordPress user and plugin developer, I have several plugins on my site (Ubernyms and Extra Smilies and Textile, just to name a few) which render on the page, but don’t show up in the preview … that’s a little distracting, so I may have to have a look at the API if I keep using this.  Which brings up another point: I usually use Textile formatting for my posts, so posting through a WYSIWYG interface is a little weird, and is making me re-consider how the Textile plugin works (it puts the unrendered Textile into the database, which means to edit these posts in Writer I have to use “HTML Code” view), and the previews are worthless. I’ll have to think about that one some more…

A few other little things:

• Several people have called for smilie support in the Writer software, but I don’t think I’d use that … I like using text emoticons in the posts and having all the graphics in one place where I can (hypothetically) switch them if I feel like it, and not hard-coded in as images.
• I’d definitely like a Flickr plugin (might even write one, if nobody else does before I get a chance).
• I’d love an option to specify a URL source (like Technorati) for the “keywords” in the post properties tab, and toggle whether I want them visible in the post (even though tags just don’t work the way they ought to in WordPress).
• The spell-check dialog needs an “Ignore All” button so I don’t get tempted to add words like “Technorati” to the dictionary when I write a post like this.
• My post seems to have a lot of unecessary   entities, I don’t know why those get inserted, but I assume it’s when I hit space twice and then delete one of them … it would be a good idea to offer an option to not insert non-breaking spaces, since most of the time, people don’t really want them (we’re not even supposed to use double spaces after a sentence anymore).
• [New] I also found that a few invalid attributes are being used in my post (I fixed them so my page still validates):
  • The link around the image had atomicselection="true" on it. This is an old Microsoft-only attribute which should never have made it into Writer.
  • The image itself had align="left" which is ok in HTML4, but not in XHTML ... this is a particularly egregious error because they’re already using the style attribute for margins anyway, so they could just put the float value in the CSS. In my case, I’ve actually got classes pre-defined for aligning images, it would have been nice if I could use those.