I spent much of my weekend playing with the beta version of the new Windows Live Writer, and I do have say – they have won me over again.  This program is sleek, it gets the job done and really – it is hard to believe that it is put out there by Microsoft for free, because there is no close competitor to Windows Live Writer out there. So lets take a look at why you might want to switch your blog updating to this magnificent tool.

The biggest improvement by far is how they got rid of the sidebar, and moved everything to the top of the program window.  I often write with a browser open on the left – and Windows Live Writer open on the right, so I need all the screen real estate I can get.  This new look gives me more space to write – and hides more of the features I don’t really need or use.

It supports a number of different blogging platforms – including WordPress, so that is always a positive. Another feature I like is that they moved the tags, categories and set post date all to the top, so it is easier to remember to set them. In the previous versions of Windows Live Writer, these were dumped in on the bottom of the window and often overlooked.

Want to give it a shot? You can download and try out the Windows Live Essentials beta of Windows Live Writer.  Just be careful during the install, because it will also ask you if you want a ton of other products you might or might not want to install just yet. I give it two thumbs up, a nice improvement on an already nice blogging program.

Here are a few things to look forward to in WordPress 2.6:

• Post Revisioning
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• A new image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click

You can check out the full list of goodies over at Ryan’s blog and also pickup the beta 1 if you have a place you’d like to play with it.

1. I want a better RSS feed reader. The one included right now sucks. Give me something like Google Reader and I will switch in an instant. It would be nice to have my mail and RSS feeds all in one spot, but right now when it comes to RSS Google is just giving me a lot more.

2. Let’s hurry up and get Calendar and Notepad working. I never really used these features in the old Yahoo! Mail, so give me something that is worth using. If you do not, then at least give me the option of getting rid of the buttons. (That could also be said for the RSS reader)

3. Give me the option to always reply in plain text. I really don’t like having to switch back to plain text every time I reply to a message. There should be a setting in the options somewhere that says “only send E-mail with plain text”. Get that in there and I would be happy.

Have anything else that needs to be done that I might have missed?

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