Trying Windows Live Writer

Today I was exploring the Windows Live services when I stumbled upon Windows Live Essentials. It’s something similar to Google Pack, though Google Pack has much more richer collection of free apps whereas Windows Live Essentials is a collection of free desktop applications from Microsoft. Some the apps included are the replacements of current Windows applications.

Windows Live Mail replacing Windows Mail/Outlook Express
Windows Live Messenger replacing MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger
Windows Live Photo Gallery replacing Windows Photo Gallery
Windows Live Movie Maker beta replacing Windows Movie Maker

Additional to above Windows Live Writer is also included. It is a desktop blog-publishing app which features WYSIWYG authoring, photo-publishing, map-publishing, and video-publishing functionality. And the best part is that it supports all major blogging services including Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, and TypePad, amongst others.

I just now installed Windows Live Essentials. I have started using Windows Live Mail, which gives me an outlook-like usability to my Hotmail mailbox and option to copy mails to my computer, and also I made Windows Live Photo Gallery the default photo viewer. Then I decided to try out the Writer with my blog hosted on Blogger, and hence this post. OK, I am clicking the publish button now …

Did you Bing?

www.bing.com

This is the latest web search offering from Microsoft, which calls it a Decision Engine as it is supposed to help make decisions apart from searching. Read here what Microsoft has to say about it.

Anyway I decided to bing the web and see what it can show me. From the first impression I feel Microsoft finally seems to be understand how things should work on internet. The interface is neat and simple, though bit heavy with graphics. The web search has some nice features like ability to suggest related searches, provide a preview to page contents without opening and also suggested alternatives for the search result. Shopping search is where I found Bing really good. It could help compare prices, show reviews, product pictures, and even offers cashbacks!! Also I liked the bird's eye view of the Bing Map search, which is based on the Microsoft Virtual Earth now called Bing Maps for Enterprise.

Overall impressive, I will not compare it with Google search yet. Mainly because today I was just poking around and didn't have anything sensible to search. I will be surely using bing as the second search option after google for my future searches. Lets see if bing can become the first option in days to come.