Windows Live Writer (which I use to post and edit my blog), shipped it's Release Candidate today as the official 2009 release. After the Vista fiasco, I was starting to loose faith in MSFTs ability to ship decent software. The Live Writer team has given me hope again – it's been a solid product from the start (with a good plugin-SDK backing it up), but it keeps getting better – especially with this release.

Cool new features?

• They have made my Polaroid Plugin add-on obsolete, by integrating new Polaroid style borders and tilt-effect abilities directly into Live Writer, here's an example of their instant photo  effect. Although, I find the ˜tilt' function buried a little too deep to be useful.

• They fixed their annoying bug where you can now click on a photo and center it vs. having to select beyond the photo.
• The added a wicked-cool photo album effect  where you can upload multiple photos and LW will auto-generate a ˜collage' effect for you with a bunch of different layout options. For example, here's little Chester munching away on his first ever spoonful of solid food at 4 months old:

View Full Album

• The only annoying part is that it forces you to link to Windows Live Photo Gallery vs. your own blog. However, I've used effects like this on some of my trip reports before – but it's been a bunch of work to generate them in Photoshop, so atleast LW now does all the heavy lifting for me.
• They also added the ability to filter your blog posts when inserting links to previous blog articles, together with an ˜auto-link this word' feature. Both of these are really useful and will save a ton of time.

Kudo's to the Live Writer team on a great release – I look forward to using it more.