Windows Live Writer 2011 reviewed

Windows Live Writer 2011 is now released (Build 15.4.3502.922) as part of the Windows Live Essentials 2011. It is quite a change as the Ribbon has been added and it takes some initial time to find where everything is located. The categories and post date are also relocated to below the Ribbon instead of at the bottom.

Finding the New posts, Open local draft, Open recent posts and some more features are available on the application menu and are not as easily accessible as before. One extra click is needed.

At least it is possible to customize the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) to have quicker access to for example New post and Open. You can also add any command that is on the ribbon to the Quick Access Toolbar by right clicking on the button and selecting "Add to Quick Access Toolbar."

Home tab.

Insert tab.

Blog Account tab.

Contextual tab when formatting a picture.

Contextual tab when formatting a video.

In Aaron’s Live Writer Blog post What has changed since the Beta refresh for Windows Live Writer 2011? we can learn about some other changes and news.

• Better support for Japanese IME
• Improved SEO
• Multi-language User Interface support (MUI)
• Aspect ratio support for Videos
• Improved support for Specific blog servers
• WordPress.com is now the default for creating new blogs via Live Writer
• “No” tags are now stripped from Web Preview
• Improved encoding support
• Copy/Paste Improvements

Still there are problems using WLW 2011 together with IE9 beta as described in Windows Live Writer 2011 beta and IE9 beta test because the problem is with Internet Explorer 9 beta and needs to be fixed.

Something I wish for is that it would be possible to select multiple images and changing the properties of them.

Alternate text and title text for images should not be a dialog box I think. These two properties should be available directly on the Ribbon for quicker access. It should also be possible to save as default if you want to have one or both of them empty.

Open old posts in Windows Live Writer works great also with WLW 2011.