Inking in Windows Live Writer

Microsoft released today Windows Live Writer Beta–a WYSIWYG editor that bloggers can use to author their posts. Pleasantly, Live Writer supports not only Microsoft’s Live Spaces blog platform as well as others. In fact, right now I’m creating this blog post from within Live Writer.

So far so good. Of course, what’s the first thing I look for in any blog tool–support for ink. Is it included in Live Writer? Kind of. Although you can’t ink in the Windows Live, you can ink in Windows Journal or OneNote, copy the ink into the clipboard and paste the “ink” into Live Writer. Unfortunately, Live Writer doesn’t manage the pasted ink as ink; instead the ink is pasted as an image, which is still quite useful. In fact, the best part, is that you don’t have to create a temporary file for the ink. Live Writer will take care of that for you. To demonstrate, here’s a little note I just jotted down in Journal:

As you can see from this ink’ed image, there is one issue that you have to be aware of–image size. You can resize and reposition the ink’ed image in Live Writer (as shown in the image at right), however, since Live Writer treats the pasted contents as an image and not as ink, if you resize the image the ink quality degrades. This isn’t so bad though.

To get around this problem, one approach is to resize the ink in Journal or OneNote first and then copy/paste the properly sized ink. Here’s a version of the same ink contents (shown below) sized before pasting into Live Writer.

Microsoft is sooo close here.

Even with this simple ability to paste ink as images, we’re that much closer to practical ink blogging.

But wait there’s more….Live Writer has an SDK for “Content Source Plugins.” Well done. I’m not sure how far we can take this, but my imagination is working overtime.

Finally, I hope this doesn’t mean that Microsoft is going to give up on improving the editing experience within the browser. More and more people use browsers for editing (emails, blog posts, and so on), so now is the time to take the browser to the next step. It’s great to see that Firefox is adding spell checking into their next browser, for example. I hope Microsoft is able to take this further. And if Microsoft does, please don’t forget ink!

Update: Live Writer doesn’t do what I thought it did. The ink isn’t uploaded to the server. Sorry for the false alarm. However, there is good news. Live Writer does allow for content plugins so I wonder if there’s a way to get around this.