Battleangel | Personal

I have to admit I was more than a little surprised to see Microsoft enter into the domain of weblog desktop clients last year. First with Windows Live Writer and later with Office (Word) 2007. Initially I was unimpressed, probably because I’m used to manual editing as opposed to WYSIWYG, but I soon came to see the brilliance of the approach Microsoft had taken. Having said that however, both WLW and Word are unfortunately flawed creations. But seeing as one is still in beta and the other is most likely going to be improved in the next Office service pack, I thought I should offer some pointers and I hope that the suggestions eventually come to the attention of the concerned parties. And I will be as brief about this as I can.

First of all I would like to commend Microsoft for taking the plunge. Desktop clients are immensely important, at least from my perspective, as they offer a much need bridge between the user and the web. A bridge that is not in any way equaled by the JavaScript-driven rich text editors that come with most modern content management systems, such as WordPress. Desktop clients are faster and better at linking content together.

First, lets look at what WLW and Word do right, respectively. Because interestingly enough, the two development teams seem to have worked entirely independently on their projects. Each client has strengths where the other has weaknesses. You would have hoped that these features could have been combined in-house to form an even better product. But a sprawling bureaucracy most likely prevented this. At the same time it is peculiar that the WLW development has ground to a halt after an initial flurry of updates. Could it even be that in-house conflicts are holding the clients back?

What I do like

Nevertheless, WLW succeeds at simple image controls, html source editing and plugins. Word on the other hand has more actual photo manipulation tools, presets and chart visualizations, plus its on-the-fly proofing tools and synonym handling just blows the competition out of the water.

Both clients are also able to auto-save items. WLW in particular has a nice draft area where posts are automatically placed while they are being worked on.

Both clients seem to work with XML-RPC and WordPress 2.1. But there are snags, more about that below.

Both clients are reasonable quick when it comes to changing weblog / servers, but WLW is much preferred due to its caching of categories until told to refresh. Word apparently fetches categories from the server every time.

What I don’t like

The pitfall of both clients is the simplified interface. Both clients have a startling lack of options for instance. Word in particular lacks the properties and trackbacks pane which is arguably essential in the long run.

Especially WLW is remarkably slow when fetching a list of old post from the server, taking several more seconds than w.bloggar for instance. I do not know why.

Word in particular is a bit quirky since it places the weblog and category selectors IN the document instead of in the toolbar. I have also had Word freeze and even crash when running manual spell checking on blog posts. It should also be noted that Word needs some sort of html source view. And perhaps even worse, Word as always tries to past formatted text by default. I eventually got so annoyed I made a plain text macro to replace Ctrl+V. Then I realized you could turn it off via the options. Duh. I also saw an option for using pixels instead of cm, but could never get it to work for blog posts. Resizing images is therefore a bit of a problem.

In fact, both clients have problems pasting unformatted text. It makes sense that rich text should be the option, not the other way around.

Both clients are also poor at html attributes like alt, class, title, id and so forth. Both clients allow you to set alt, but only Word prints empty, but ostensibly valid, attributes like alt=”". Personally I prefer to leave alt empty and write a description, if any, as title. As for class, I believe most knowledgeable people use class=”right” or some such instead of align=”right”. Align is a little last century. Plus I also need class to set image boxes for certain images. It is not reasonable to have to fix these thing in the WordPress editor since it is exactly that editor I’m trying to escape.

While both editors can send images via XML-RPC (at least in WP 2.1) and do work with the date-based sub-folders, they each have a bad naming scheme. Here is what you get if you upload an image that you created in Word, to a post called “Testing Word 2007 and XML-RPC”:

020207-1301-testingword1.png

Which makes sense since it has been created from scratch. But if you insert a .jpg image from your harddrive, and resize it a bit it gets suspiciously renamed to:

020207-1301-testingword1.jpg

Not so fabulous. But still acceptable. In WLW you get stuck with something like this, posting a .gif image called “second_life.gif” in its original size to a post called “Get a first life”:

windowslivewritergetafirstlife-c5efsecond-life5.gif

Again, some control over the procedure would be nice, and if there indeed is to be no user control, I prefer the middle ground, adding date and time to the file name but keeping the original name. Also, I’d like to see an estimate of the file size of the image that is about to be uploaded. And while on the topic I have found that Word sometimes botches the anti-aliasing of shapes that are inserted as images.

So all in all, a little more user control over attributes, file names plus combining the best features of Word and WLW and I think that both Microsoft and bloggers would have a winning concept.

See also: Blog Client Software A brief summary of desktop blog clients.