As a followup to my post about getting BlogJet working under Crossover Mac (formally Crossover Office), I thought I’d post my thoughts on Windows Live Writer. A good friend of mine has informed me that he thinks Windows Live Writer is the “ultimate” blogging client. It supports many of the same features as BlogJet, which happens to be share-ware meaning you ultimately have to part with some money, but WLW is free-ware direct from the Microsoft stable.
One feature that BlogJet has that I’m not sure WLW includes, is group posting whereby the same blog entry is sent to multiple blogs. However, a quite desirable feature of WLW is it’s ability to determine the exact format of your blog posts as they appear on your site. It can then display your post as it will finally appear, including fonts and colours, while you’re editing it.
Onto my attempt at getting WLW to run under Crossover. I believe there is a fundamental incompatibility at present between Crossover and the Windows Live installer. Upon starting the down-loaded installer application I am immediately greeted with a dialogue box stating: “Couldn’t install programs. Please try installing Windows Live programs again.” There is a “Show Details” button which reveals the error code and “next steps”.
As I was testing this installation procedure using an alpha/beta build of Crossover Mac, I have also filed a bug report to the relevant issue tracker on the CodeWeavers web-site. Attached to this report is the complete installation log (which I have omitted from uploading here).
Windows Live Writer has, since writing this post, been discontinued. However, it has been liberated and released to the community in the form of the Open Source Open Live Writer.