This article is very pro-Microsoft. If you hate technology or Microsoft, this article will offend you and please comment saying it did so. IF you honestly do not care, comment nevertheless 
I personally don’t have anything against microsoft, but lately, I’ve been favouring them. Their Desktop Blog editing tool, Windows Live Writer, which I’m using right now, is one of the best applications I’ve used, let alone blog editor. Now what’s funny, is that:
For more screenshots:Click Here
- It’s free.
- It has an open API so has many plugins are available for it.
- It’s microsoft.
Now, I just opened up digg and I see this article about microsoft’s feed reader. Microsoft’s products, office, or whatever are very elaborate, though expensive, but this was free. I checked the reader out and it was love at first sight. It had the brilliant office 2007(or office 12) interface system that’ll fit well with vista. It is mainly a picture organizer, with many features. It’s sort of a picasa and a feed reader put together. It is called microsoft MAX.(www.microsoft.com/max). I’ll let you check the features out.
I see where microsoft is heading with this. This, live writer and most of their new apps have an open API(Automated programming interface or something like that) which means that people can easily write programs that enhance their features. This more importantly means that microsoft programs enhance each other. Even Internet Explorer 7 has a new open API, and has a site dedicated to addons (www.ieaddons.com). Now I’m expecting that Vista will see all these put together and seamless interactivity. I would really love to see something like that. Making vista more open could seriously pose a threat to Linux.
Microsoft seems to be going the google way by not being evil to get more money. IE7 is a mile ahead of IE6, when firefox 2 is hardly any different from firefox 1.5, and microsoft’s moves are looking good.
But as for the blog reader, though it’s good and intuitive and strong, I’ll stick to my current feed reader mainly because:
- This new feed reader doesen’t offer anything NEW. It’s just better interface and better graphics coupled with .net Framework 3.0 betarc1.
- My current reader, FeedDemon, has a few nice features that can be added as plugins, but absent nevertheless.
- MAX is mainly an image editing and desktop reader. Stupid stupid microsoft made it one application. I don’t know why, they’re unreleated. If the reader was standalone, I’d probably get it.
- It’s 54 fu*ing mb, and the net speed sucks right now.
- And last but most important, I have exams I need to study. I’m sorry but I don’t have time to install, troubleshoot, subscribe compare and type.
Sorry Microsoft.
Better Luck Next time.
[tags]microsoft, microsoft_max, max, rss, aggregator, review, technology, software, live_writer[/tags]
Hey tx for commenting on my blog. As regards Microsoft being evil, I do not think thats true. People who say so should be kicked in the butt and be told build a product which runs on 95% machines in the world and then comment. The reader that MS released actually doesnt work with Vista RC1 which is really sad and they should have released this as a part of the live services.
i use blogdesk. simple and so fool proof. not body can wrong with that. well except for if u are using SAC’s comps.
I tried blogdesk.
1.blogdesk doesen’t download the style of your blog and autopreview how te post will look like
2. blogdesk doesent’ have the advanced image editing facilities.
plus, blogdesk didn’t have support for proxy servers, so I couldn’t get it to connect.
but LiveWriter is a windows only thing, a pity. While linux has amaroK, windows have liveWriter. The titans are evenly matched.
ahem…correction kid. blogdesk does have a image editor.
jus enough for me!
As for autopreview, proxy server…yes, it doesnt have those features. wait a min, why do you need a auto preview by the way???
Well, I never.
I’ve tried blogdesk. It was probably number 3 out of the 13 I tried. Best among the free ones. (no 2 being performancing, and no 1, you can guess)
Hmmm…LiveWriter has a more professional feel with many more features like autosave, automatic insertion of photos from flickr, easy insertion of maps, etc. It also did the best job of detecting my blog. Qumana and ecto did the worst and didn’t even recognize it. For some reason, my host refused to allow POST to xmlrpc.php (some load with the server for any file named xmlrpc.php) so I had to rename it to x1.php, and lw did the best job.
There are also autosaving and easy access to custom css hacks, you can work with the sidebar and make sure that in case you make the image too big, it won’t displace your sidebar. Wordpress breaks with more large images in iexplorer and you don’t want that to happen.
Give lw a shot, I gather you run linux and lw uses .net framework, but I’ll post a detailed review sometime soon.