Microsoft has made their blogging tool Windows Live Writer as Open-source now, its fork is now available as Open Live Writer with some changes. Live Writer’s last version is still available and offered as part of Windows Essentials 2012.
Open Live Writer (OLW) is not a Microsoft Product, it’s an open-source project and is part of .NET foundation and managed by a group of volunteers. Let us see which features have been removed from Open Live Writer and the new ones added, below.
What’s new in Open Live Writer
1. 3rd-party Spell Checker used in WLW has been removed and a new spell check will soon be added to OLW, that uses built-in Spellchecker in Windows 8, if you use Windows 7, know this:Open Live Writer doesn’t contain a spell-checker.
2. Blog This API plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and Albums features have been removed as well.
3. Open Live Writer will soon support Google’s OAuth2 authentication for Blogger (blogspot blogs), WLW has never supported and not going to support Oauth2, so bloggers on blogger platform should make a switch to OLW from WLW.
4. Windows Live Writer plugins work with Open Live writer: WLW has supported plugins, Open Live Writer too supports WLW plugins, OLW team is working on this, give them the feedback on which Live Writer plugins you want to see available for Open Live Writer.
5. Once installed, Open Live Writer and Windows Live Writer can be run side-by-side on your computer.
Open Live Writer installation and usage experience
If you’ve installed and used WLW in the past, you won’t find the installation and usage of Open Live Writer different, user interface has not changed at all, to sum up, its same old blogging tool with few features being removed (mentioned above).
At the moment, this tool uses Live Writer’s old code and the volunteer team before adding ‘bunch of async and await and new .NET 4.6isms’, is currently focusing on stability and regular updates.
Note: You can still download and use Windows Live Writer on your computer.
Download Open Live Writer (works on Windows 7, 8 and Windows 10) of 4.6 MB in size by visiting Open Live Writer homepage.