shahine.com/omar/

Too many people wrote about writer today for me to link to any of them .

I started using Writer as soon as the internal beta started. I was so very surprised and excited when I first used it. For one thing I had no idea we were working on a blogging app (other than Word 2007) but this one will be better than Word IMHO because it's so well targeted at blogging as a scenario. The only thing I'll miss from word is the excellent contextual spelling support in 2007.

If anyone was watching the dasBlog checkins I've been making they would have noticed two things.

1. RSD Support. This makes it so that you can simply point the blogging application at your site URL and the software automatically configures itself for your blog. Easy as pie.
2. MetaWeblog.newMediaObject. This makes it so that you can attach images to your post without having to remember how FTP paths work. Basically dasBlog and the blogging application do all the heavy lifting for you. While I didn't actually check in this support for dasBlog, I fixed a few bugs to make it work with Writer.

Both of these will be in dasBlog 1.9. Those two features alone were enough for me to stop using BlogJet. The features below were icing on the cake.

Anyway, Back to writer. There are a few things I love about it.

1. I love how it handles Drafts. You just close the window and it autosaves, You can keep a long list of draft items (I like to treat my drafts as todo's for blog posts). All the draft UI is handled seamlessly in the application.
2. It's awesome to be able to preview your post using the CSS of your blog. Very innovative.
3. Inserting Pictures is fun and easy. I like the border and drop shadow effects.
4. Love the insert Map
5. Come to think of it, I love the fact that there is an API. I wrote two plugins already .

Here is a screen shot of my first plugin, Insert Code that uses the excellent CSharpFormat. It will pretty print your code with a few options.

And here is a screen shot of my 2nd plugin, Insert SmugMug Image (for my favorite photo site, SmugMug). This plugin will allow you to insert a photo from your SmugMug gallery.

I hope to get both of these available for download in the next few days (no promises).

Writer is going to be a great successful product. You can just tell by how excited the team is about their product, and how responsive they were to the internal dogfood/beta community.