Live Writer Is Now Open Source

[frik]

Please open source "Windows Live Photo Gallery" too (also part of the Live package for Windows 7+).

It's a superb photo management application that was introduced with Vista (similar to iPhoto/Photos/Lightroom). It stays in low maintainance mode since its Vista days (moved to Live apps bundle) and it would have a better home in the open source community.

[sosuke]

I could not agree more. Windows Live/Essentails Photo Gallery is the best tool for keeping the file as the source of record. I evaluated several photo face tagging tools and it was the best as far as leaving meta data in the file and updating the file information properly. Picasa and Photos/iPhoto just couldn't seem to do it and each has a separate database.

Check out this post from 2006 where they talk about it and some cases where they can't "truth in the file" that seem like a very reasonable list of circumstances. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pix/archive/2006/08/16/702780.aspx

[pjc50]

Also I've found Live Movie Maker is a remarkably useful tool for taking files recorded off the TV (using the now discontinued Windows Media Centre - how about open sourcing that too?) and turning them into MP4.

[vive-la-liberte]

Someone knowlegable about Live Writer should update the Wikipedia article about Windows Live Writer with this information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Writer

[jongalloway2]

Done - I just linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Live_Writer which is pretty comprehensive.

[strangetimes]

To this day I run a Windows 7 VM in Parallels on my MacBook Air in Coherence mode just so I can write blog posts in Windows Live Writer. I looked for years for a setup that could beat this, and unbelievably, never found it.

[derefr]

Not necessarily better, but sort of equivalent: Windows Terminal Server since version 2008-or-so has had "RemoteApp" support, meaning that you can configure the (multiplatform) Microsoft Remote Desktop client to connect to a (single running app on a) Terminal Services server with a similar UX to Parallels' Coherence mode.

Azure offers what's effectively "Running-individual-apps-as-a-Service" by booting TS server VMs and serving RemoteApp sessions from them. They have a demo to see how it feels (https://www.remoteapp.windowsazure.com/en/tour.aspx). If you don't like Azure, you could do something equivalent using e.g. AWS WorkSpaces instances.

Or, disregarding the networking aspect, you could just run your Windows VM headless on your MBA (and therefore using any VM software you like, e.g. VirtualBox) and RDP into it with the same RemoteApp configuration. It may or may not be more responsive than Coherence, but I'd bet on it being less battery-intensive.

[ghaff]

I use MarsEdit on a Mac and (mostly) like it. I used Live Writer way back when but, at some point, I stopped doing so--don't remember why but I'm pretty sure it was before I switched off Windows.

[BinaryIdiot]

Oh very cool! This was one of my favorite apps at the time but it never worked with any of the blog platforms I was on so I only got to play with it. Glad it's opened up now. Maybe we'll see more usage.

[breakingcups]

This is really cool. Open sourcing is always THE suggestion whenever a product gets abandoned and it is amazing to see Microsoft of all companies to follow through with it.

Thanks everyone who made this happen!

[mwcampbell]

Interesting that Live Writer uses Windows Forms, though WPF was available, at least within Microsoft, when the project started. I wonder why.

[ccurrens]

The readme on their github[1] says that Live Writer was originally part of an acquisition. I would guess that winforms may have already been in use when they acquired Onfolio. There may be other reasons as well, but I don't know what they are :)

[1] https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter

[jarnonijboer]

Quote from Scott Hansleman's blog post[1] "Much of the code in Open Live Writer is nearly 10 years old. The coding conventions, styles, and idioms are circa .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1."

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingOpenLiveWriterAnOpen...

[tonyedgecombe]

I wonder if it could be adapted for editing and publishing a Jekyll site?

[z3t4]

I always post this rant about HTML (WYSIWIG) editors. If you know what the buttons do, you can also code HTML! All you have to know is the button's corresponding html-tags: h1, h2, p, br, b, i, img, a, ul, ol, li, table, tr, th, td.

[Doctor_Fegg]

Why should you have to? Command- or control-B is quicker to type than </b>, and you get a fluid reading experience with real bold, rather than <b> </b> breaking up the flow of text.

[tonyedgecombe]

Users shouldn't need to know HTML to be able to write a blog post.