Windows Live Writer is an interesting bit of blog-client software.  It offers some MS Word-like features, but simpler – and lets you do blogging in a fairly light-weight and easy-to-use environment.

There are, however – things that really drive me up the wall with it, and there hasn’t been any new updates to LiveWriter for a long time. (August 11th, sheesh?!)

#1 – Image Quality

The LiveWriter has this annoying habit of blurring the pictures which are copied in, unless you remove it’s dropshadowing.

Here’s an example:

(with default drop-shadow setting)

(with photo-paper setting)

(with “Inherit from Weblog” setting)

It doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t change the default to “inherit”, and you can’t fix the blurring – Microsoft needs to fix this. Now.

You can tell blog entries that have been published with LiveWriter, simply by their image quality.

Here’s a completely non-random sampling of my morning’s RSS reading:

• Just a little more on “What is Community”
• How to Hack WCF – New Technology, Old Hacking Tricks
• Shadow Copy not working in Vista?

The common theme? (Apart from being Microsoft bloggers) They were all published with Windows Live Writer. The key indicator is that there’s dropshadows and blur on the images. Which makes them look (sorry guys) like those joke images that’ve been passed around, embedded in powerpoint documents sent via email through just about every person on the planet.

#2 – Dictionary Support

Having a spell-checker is kinda handy when you’re blogging – and I like that it operates like Outlook’s “spellcheck-on-send” feature.

The thing that really drives me up the wall is that you can’t install other dictionaries. Heck, it won’t even use the installed Office dictionary. 

 #3 – No Integrated Proxy Support

This isn’t so much of an issue, most of the time – but even my basic .NET apps let you use the windows account for authentication – it’s about 3 lines of code, plus some switching logic to determine if you need to use this setting.

This also means my password is sent in cleartext (rather than used to obtain a Kerberos token, which is used to authenticate against the proxy), and that I need to keep updating it (passwords expire every 60 days or so here).

Edit: Pingbacks were sent… damn, sorry folks. (I didn’t mean for that to happen)

Steve Clayton “Geek In Disguise” has a post up about something very cool.

Well, I’ve got no idea what it is – there’s an embedded video of some sort from (I believe) Brightcove – but it has… “issues”. 

The first issue I encountered was that it complained about the connection speed.
Work’s connection isn’t that bad, depending on the site I can pull down 50-100K/sec from most well-connected US Sites. 900K/sec+ from Australian sites isn’t unheard of either.  (Using a Speed-Test site I get between 4Mbit and 6Mbit down – which isn’t bad.)

The the other major issue is that it crashes Firefox (latest release) randomly. Loading it up in Internet Explorer 7 I just get a spinning “Loading Video” icon for something over 5 minutes (I wasn’t prepared to wait longer).

It’s also difficult to find out what Steve is referring to – since he just links to the RSS feed for the Business Two Zero blog – no descriptive text, nada. Perhaps Steve is referring to the Multi-touch screen?

These issues aren’t Steve’s fault – but by not providing any helping text, made it inaccessible to someone who can’t see/use the video.

Aside from that – Steve’s blog is generally pretty cool… just, this once thing annoyed me I’ve had a few of these Brightcove embedded videos show up in my Google Reader recently, both times resulting in a lockup and crash.