So I have taken to doing more blogging lately after a very long hiatus. As apart of my step back into blogging I did another search for desktop blogging applications that would work on the Mac as well as Windows Live Writer works on Windows. Unfortunately IMO there is still nothing that comes close.
My love for Windows Live Writer has pushed me to what may claim to be an extreme work around, but never the less, it is what works for me and I am happy.
What I have done is installed Windows 7 in Parallels and run WLW in it. My Macbook runs great with 1GB of its 4GBs of RAM allocated to Windows. It only begins to slow down if I happen to be running Parallels, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop at the same time (DM and PS are running in OS X). I usually do not have those open when wanting to blog though so I really do not run into trouble.
Some may ask what would push me to run a completely different operating system just to do the occasional blog post?
There are several reasons for this.
The first would be that WLW actually downloads the images and CSS from your blog and you are typing your post in the exact format that you blog is in. This is really helpful when you are doing formatting items such as H tags and images. It truly is WISIWIG and it makes for faster posting of more attractive posts.
Speaking of images WLW has the best image editor of any other desktop blogging tool I have seem. All you do is drag and drop the image into your post. From there you can resize the image by grabbing a corner and dragging. Once you are done dragging the corner the image is resampled as opposed to just being resized. I have not seen any other blogging tool do this.
Also available are a whole bunch of effects you can give the images such as drop shadows, photo frames, and reflections. Along with that you can set custom margins for the images so that your text does not run into them. Finally you can set the images to link to pages, the original size of you image, or to nothing at all. It really does make incorporating images into your posts easy.
There are several other features that WLW has but the above mentioned ones are those that I use the most. They make it worth it to run Windows on my Mac 😉 .
Comments
2 responses to “Blogging on My Mac with Windows 7 and Live Writer”
While WLW is good (Certainly the best I have found so far), I still find it lacking (integrating with Joomla! is a bit painful. but that is Joomla! not WLW). It screws up some templates (maybe that is the template designer’s fault). Its image handling is best of any desktop client I’ve tried. My main gripe is the inability to use predefined CSS classes.
While the standard headers, strong, em, and u are adequate for most tasks, sometimes it is nice to be able to mark up a sentence or two without hardcoding it.
For example: [p class=”something_special”]Now I can change my paragraph presentation via CSS [/p].
It would be nice if WLW pulled class info out of your template and allowed you to apply it as any other HTML markup.
You know it has been a while since I posted this article and in the mean time I have used WLW less and less.
There are two main reasons for this.
The first is the time it takes to boot up Windows just to use WLW. It is just not worth the minute or two plus any updates that Windows does just to do a quick post. The second is that the image handling in the native WordPress interface is much better now. With the 3.0 update you can even pull theme stills into the WYSIWYG so seeing how you post is going to show is much easier.
For me now it is a rare occasion when I post from WLW. In fact I think I post from my iPhone 10x more the WLW (which is where I am posting this comment from)!