Evil Microsoft: Windows Live Writer

Microsoft introduces a free, extensible, Win32 blog authoring tool. Google doesn't have one. There aren't any good ones in the OS X world. The only decent one I know of is BlogJet, also Windows only.

Writer Zone: Introducing Windows Live Writer:

Writer is a great client for Windows Live Spaces but also works with other weblogs including Blogger [jf: aka Google's blog platform] LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (and many others).

Writer supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), the Metaweblog API, and the Movable Type API.

We want Writer to work well with every blogging service out there. If you can’t get Writer to work with your blog, we want to know.

Oooohh. This is wicked evil. After deciding Microsoft was a corporation on Crack, a sly move like this makes me wonder if Ozzie can turn it around ...

Of course I'll have to try it out ...

Apple? Google? Are you paying attention? Time to wake-up boys, the Beast isn't quite dead yet ...

Update 7/15/06: It's really beta. I tried posting a draft to Blogger and it did a true post, as well as generating a bizarre Blogger error message. Not ready for primetime!

Update 7/8/07: It got a LOT better. I love it now.

Windows Live Writer: moving between machines (yech)

I love WLW, but it has an Achilles heel. On XP it’s pretty much impossible to move your configuration data between machines.

Of course that’s true for almost all of  Microsoft’s products, but we expect better of WLW. On the other hand, I hear rumor there’s a configuration migration service built into Vista (some OS), so maybe it works fine there.

I found out about this after I switched machines. I have the old data of course, but I’ll just migrate manually. It would be nice if the WLW were to build in a migration utility, but for now here are two somewhat useful references:

• Backup your WLW Settings: a post about this utility, but the utility is quite old and hasn’t been updated
• Migrate Windows Live Writer data: reveals location of the files, unfortunately key data is in the foul pits of Hell, aka the Windows Registry.

There’s some accessible data in ..

• C:\work\My Weblog Posts (path will vary)
• C:\Documents and Settings\[userid]\Application Data\Windows Live Writer

You might imagine you could copy your older WLW posts and drafts to C:\…\My Weblog Posts and WLW would be able to browse and search them, but that doesn’t work. It can open them if you double-click on them, but there’s a cache/index missing somewhere.

Happily, if you copy our old posts and drafts into the new WLW folders (ex: C:\work\My Weblog Posts) and delete the XML cache files WLW will rebuild them and find all your draft and new posts.[1]

[1] I got messed up here because when I forgot to point the “My Documents” folder to my personal file store. So WLW was only looking in My Documents. I copied the data from My Documents then pointed My Documents to c:\work then launched WLW.

Update 6/17/09: Corrected my mistake about posts recovery.

MarsEdit 3.1.3 - Still not Windows Live Writer, but definitely worth the money

I've been evaluating the MarsEdit OS X blog writing tool since November 2004. In 2007 I gave it a good try, but it fell short. Finally, in May 2010 I bought it, but by July 2010 I threw it out. It didn't measure up to my lost love - Windows Live Writer [1].

Six years is a long time to evaluate a product, but not as long as I've been fighting with Google's incompetence. Evidently billions of dollars aren't enough to create a rich text editor that knows the difference between <div></br> and <p></p>. This past October Blogger broke me. While I researched alternative hosting solutions, I decided to give MarsEdit another try. By this time it was at version 3.1.2.

MarsEdit is now good enough. Try it, buy it ($40).

No, it's still not the equal of Microsoft's free Windows Live Writer, but WLW was one of the finest pieces of consumer software created in the past five years on any platform. WLW is one hell of a high standard. MarsEdit is now about 60% as good as WLW, and that's more than good enough.

The key to succeeding with MarsEdit is not to mix MarsEdit posts with any Blogger product. Don't use Google's BlogThis! to create a draft post, use the "Post with MarsEdit"/Blog This bookmarklet that comes with MarsEdit. Don't touch your posts with Bloggers pustulent editor, open them with MarsEdit [2]. When you paste text, always use "Paste and Match Style" (sure wish that didn't strip out URLs though).

You can alternate editing a post with MarsEdit and WLW by the way. The post formatting will not be injured.

There are several bugs with the rich text editor portion of WLW. I don't see them very often because I've learned workarounds. Sometimes you just have to switch to the HTML editor to remove <div> tags that seem to confuse MarsEdit -- though if you stick with WLW (Windows) and MarsEdit (OS X) you won't run into this problem. There are bugs with <blockquote>, it helps to include an extra line before the paragraph.

The good news is that you can learn to work around the bugs, and there's an end to them. Honestly, I rarely notice them any more. I notice more the rich text editor's lack of keyboard shortcuts or menu bar icons for commonly used commands. Daniel Jalkut is actively working on MarsEdit though, and I think they'll be there in the next release.

MarsEdit has made my life better. It's not perfect, but it improves. Within a year or two I bet it's 75% of WLW, and that's way more than good enough.

[1] Lost because I'm pure OS X at home, and because Microsoft has abandoned the product. Since it was about perfect though, it will be a fine tool for years to come. They've relabeled a "2011" version, but really there have been no changes.

[2] Ok, so I do open quite old posts with Blogger's editor.

MarsEdit 3 - you're no Windows Live Writer

I bought MarsEdit 3. After a couple of months of use I'd give it a B+. It's much better than anything else on OS X for publishing to Blogger, but it's a weak shadow of Microsoft's (abandoned) Windows Live Writer (Win only).

The image handling is particularly weak. On the other hand the bugs aren't too awful and the customer support is superb. I'd love to see Red Sweater study WLW and emulate as many features as possible.

The real competitor on OS X is Google's own web based editor. If Google were to put their A team on blogger I think MarsEdit would get squashed. They're not going to do that though, and the current team can't even get paragraphs working. So there's an opening for MarsEdit. I hope they squeeze through ...

Update 8/7/10: I threw MarsEdit off my drive after it produced a complete hash of a post. It looked fine in MarsEdit's wysiwyg editor, but it was a mess in Blogger. I had to fire up an XP VN and use Windows Live Writer to repair the damage. Using a rich text editor as a proxy for a true HTML editor is a bad idea.

Windows Live Writer news: 2009 and Blog This for Firefox 3.0

The really big news on one of my favorite apps from any vendor is that Joe Cheng has released a version of the "Blog This" add-on for Firefox 3. So we don't have to follow Joe's prior workarounds. Unfortunately it's in "sandbox mode" and won't be generally available until it collects a number of positive reviews.

So take a moment, register as a Firefox add-on tester, and contribute your five star review with a big thank you to Joe. My guess is he had to make time from his Microsoft duties to get this out.

In comparison, the announcement of a new version of WLW is a minor detail: Windows Live Writer 2009: Release Candidate. I mean, it's not like WLW 2.x was missing very much. The only WLW version news that would excite me would be a Mac version, which falls into the hell freezing category.

There's nothing in the features list I care about. Really, what I'd most like is a way to search against the titles of the post history list, and have other ways to manage the list of past posts. [See updates. Turns out the preview has some nice fixes to minor bugs and some great new features – like searching the list of retrieved past posts.]

WLW 2009 is bundled with "Windows Live Essentials", but I think you can choose which to install.

I'll wait for the release version. It's hard to improve on something as fine as WLW 2.x. Except, of course, by releasing the Firefox Blog This add-on.

Update: Joe commented that Firefox "Blog This" is a certified Microsoft product, not solely his project. Joe also tells us that the new version of WLW has the title search feature I wanted, implemented as filter.

Guess I'll have to test earlier than expected!

Thanks for the correction Joe, and thanks for your work and that of the WLW team.

Update 12/23/08: Blog This! is still stuck in the sandbox, so it needs more reviews. Works great, of course. WLW 2009 preview looks very good, so I’m glad I didn’t wait. I love the “filtering” feature – but I think it’s better than title filtering. I think it’s searching entire posts. They’ve also fixed the minor but annoying bug where the display of some labels/categories/tags for Blogger was truncated. The problem’s been long understood, but it wasn’t serious enough to justify a patch outside of this update. You have to uncheck a few things, but the new Windows Live installer will eventually agree to simply update WLW 1 and the IE toolbar.

Lookout CAN run on Outlook 2007

Lookout for Outlook was the best full text Outlook search solution ever to run on XP. It wasn't half bad for handling file system search as well. The last version had some bugs, but it was fundamentally excellent.

Alas, Microsoft bought the company and killed the product. Windows Live Search (aka Windows Desktop Search) is what I use now, though I fear it has deep bugs that might be killing XP. Of course I have a completely plausible paranoid fear that every new Microsoft product and patch is designed to covertly degrade Windows XP (the noble Windows Live Writer team doesn't know about the changes being made to their code after check-in).

Microsoft wrote the encyclopedia on killing rival products by creating subtle and gross incompatibilities, and Microsoft's most hated enemy these days is Windows XP. The Dark Arts are never truly forgotten.

But I digress.

Joel Spolsky tells us that the original developer is finding ways to extend Lookout's lifespan:

Getting Lookout to run on Outlook 2007 again - Joel on Software: "...the original author of Lookout, Mike Belshe, had just posted instructions for getting Lookout to work on Outlook 2007."

Incidentally, Belshe has a blog. Today's post has him praising Windows Live Writer and cursing Microsoft's web sites. I love reading people who agree with me, so I'll add his blog to my feedlist.

Windows Live OneCare: maybe Microsoft is still incompetent

How much trouble is Microsoft having with their Windows Live OneCare subscription service? Let me count the ways:

1. Live OneCare is red recently. It says "An error has prevented Windows Live OneCare from installing a required upgrade".
2. I click "get help" and manually check for updates.
3. I get a notice that page URL has changed -- danger! danger! I persist.
4. The update page can't verify my account status.
5. I click the link I'm next shown for technical support.
6. I get this: Page Not Found: "undefined"

What a relief. I was afraid Microsoft was rediscovering competence. Maybe Windows Live Writer is some kind of statistical fluke. This latest debacle gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling ...

Update: unsurprisingly, an uninstall, new download and reinstall fixed the problem.

Windows Live Writer blog authoring client is in beta 2

The announcement is here. My favorite blogging tool has had a big update - and it's still "beta". I especially appreciate the Sharepoint 2007 support and the "paste special" options. No mention of Firefox support, unsurprisingly. IE only, Windows only, etc.

Alas, the Sharepoint integration suggests Microsoft won't kill this product. Live Writer will kill every other Windows blog authoring tool on the market, I suspect it's already finished off BlogJet. There's nothing as good on OS X; that's particularly disturbing.

Update: A local tech column reveals WLW has Minnesota roots. The chief architect "J.J. Allaire, is a Macalester College graduate and a former Minnesota tech entrepreneur". I live just south of Macalester ...

Update 6/2/07: I thought I used to be able to view and act on prior blogger posts using WLW. The update information claims I can edit in the blog and in WLW and WLW will manage versioning. Neither of these are working for me today.

Update 6/15/07: Duh. You can download the lasts 500 posts easily from any blog, and then, like this one, edit it in WLW. Just use the File Open menu. I had to be told this by one of the product architects after asking for this "feature" on his blog. In retrospect this is how the prior version worked. Just another sign of dementia. After weeks of regular use the only complaint I have is that it takes a while startup on first use on my system. This is one beautiful product! There's nothing like it in the OS X world, Microsoft is trouncing Apple here.

Update 7/25/07: There's a Firefox extension for Live Writer. It didn't work when I tried it last December, but it's been working perfectly for the past month.

Windows Live Writer - beware the Trojan Horse updater

I received a notice to update my beloved Windows Live Writer* yesterday. I unthinkingly downloaded the installer.

Fool.

It was a Trojan Horse. No, not a "Trojan" as in a carrier for anonymous malware, "Trojan Horse" in the historic sense of a gift containing unwanted vermin.

The installer has plagued my system with a suite of Windows Live products that I don't want and that are almost certain to reduce system stability. Now I have to tediously uninstall:

• Live Call
• Live Messenger
• Photo Gallery
• Live Family Safety
• Mail
• various Outlook add-ins
• heaven knows what else

Now you know. Don't make my mistake.

*The only good, new, Microsoft product in five years. An acquisition of course. Microsoft has since abandoned it; I think the original (Minnesota?) team is gone. Microsoft is doomed to immense wealth and mediocrity.

IE Menu bars gone? Can't add them back? Gray text? Maybe you did an IE reset

I went to use IE 7 and found that Windows Live Writer's Blog This tool was missing.

Not only that, but the Omea and Windows Live toolbars were gone, and they couldn't be added back in. The text for these menu bars was gray (or grey) and couldn't be selected.

I reinstalled Windows Live Writer, but nothing changed.

A bug? Virus? Corporate security error?

No, IE was working as designed. I'd foolishly used IE's (Internet Options) "Reset Internet Explorer settings" button when I was debugging another problem.

I really should have read the fine print about "disabled browser add-ons".

Here's how to reactivate your add-ons, menu bars and so on ..

How to reset Internet Explorer settings

The Reset Internet Explorer Settings feature disables all toolbars, browser extensions, and customizations that you install. To use any of these disabled customizations, you must selectively enable each customization through the Manage Add-ons dialog box.
Note Some toolbars may require that two or more controls are enabled to work correctly. These toolbars have controls for the corresponding Browser Helper Object and toolbar extensions. You can easily use the Manage Add-ons dialog box to enable any disabled controls that are from a trusted publisher.

"Manage Add-ons" can be found under IE 7's "Programs" tab. You don't need to click OK after each change. Sort by status and set all disabled to enabled, then click OK.

There is a genuine bug here by the way. It's "fine" to disable add-ons per the fine print, but the reinstall should have worked. The disabled add-ons apparently blocked the reinstall.

XP: Recent lessons from the dark side

[see update about the two "versions" of WDS and a later update as the saga continued ...]

At home I sail the often calm waters of OS X. At work I fight the fury of the storm, trapped in the XP triangle.

Now, it must be admitted that if my Dell XP laptop were sentient I'd be condemned as a cruel master. I torture the darned thing. I know few who see as much of XP and Office's brittle nastiness as I. Maybe if I treated OS X the way I do XP it would break to. (Vista? You're joking, right?)

That said, a recent flurry of cascading messes taught me a new lesson and reminded me of old ones.

1. Sometime in the past few weeks my 75GB drive suddenly had only 9GB free. It's dangerous to fall below 20% free space on a heavily used XP or OS X system, and I think this was one of the "straws" that pushed my XP system from its usual metastable state to accelerating collapse. In retrospect I'd somehow ended up with a 5GB orphaned pagefile.sys. I couldn't see it, because I somehow had Explorer configured to not show system files [12]. I eliminated the orphaned pagefile.sys by accident [1], but I think if I'd had Explorer showing me system files I'd have seen it, and dealt with it. New lesson: always display the hidden files so you can track pagefile.sys.
2. A combination of Windows Desktop Search [5], an unstable corporate network with intermittent Exchange connectivity failure, a 3.5 GB Outlook PST file [11], severe disk fragmentation [2], bugs with Outlook 2003 [3], my use of Microsoft's Onfolio [4], my insanely persistent use of Palm synchronization [6], Microsoft's Live Meeting Outlook Add-in [7] finally led to a system meltdown with increasingly odd Outlook behavior and, finally, OST corruption.
3. Good news: no covert alerts of drive read/write errors in XP's monitoring tools (XP quietly tracks many disk failures without notifying even admin users) and no chdksk/scandisk/whatever-it's-called-now problems.

So now my OST file was corrupt. Happily, that's usually not a big deal and it wasn't this time either. I turned off WDS (I snoozed indexing but I think I should have disabled the indexing service using XP's service manager - it kept trying to return to life) and found my OS file in "C:\Documents and Settings\[user_id]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook". I renamed it and restarted Outlook, which then rebuilt my OST file from the Exchange Server. The new version was about 7MB smaller than the old one (103MB) but I seemed to have everything -- including some old tasks that suddenly reappeared from the twilight zone. I then ran my series of Outlook clean-up switches [9]

/cleandmrecords
Deletes the logging records saved when a manager or a delegate declines a meeting.
/cleanfreebusy
Clears and regenerates free/busy information. This switch can only be used when you are able to connect to your Microsoft Exchange server.
/cleanprofile
Removes invalid profile keys and recreates default registry keys where applicable.
/cleanreminders
Clears and regenerates reminders.
/resetfolders
Restores missing folders for the default delivery location.

DANGER (don't run this one unless you need it):
/resetnavpane
Clears and regenerates the Navigation Pane for the current profile. This will vaporize your Outlook Shortcut pane

When all was done I restarted WDS and had it rebuild its index from scratch, then I set my Palm sync to have Outlook overwrite the Palm.

Another fun lunchtime with Microsoft ...

------------- footnotes --------------------

[1]I removed my cache to free up enough space to run defrag, and when I restored a fixed 2GB cache the system asked if I wanted to delete an old pagefile.sys. Then my free space reappeared. A new 160GB high speed drive is on order.

[2] XP won't defrag when free space is less than 15%. OS X is much less prone to serious fragmentation.

[3] Still, it's much better than its predecessor.

[4] XP has the world's best blog writer, Windows Live Writer, but XP's corporate-friendly blog readers are very weak - and getting worse. Onfolio was the best, but Microsoft has left it to fester post acquisition. I fear it's becoming increasingly unsafe. OS X has the opposite problem -- lousy authoring tools, great readers. Of course OS X can also run WLW in a VM ...

[5] Really, I need all this stuff. But WDS is trying to index 4GB of Outlook and hundreds of thousands of system files.

[6] If you're not a Palm addict, I beg you, don't start. Life with Palm and Outlook/Exchange is like juggling antimatter, and it gets worse all the time.

[7] Ok, so this is another straw on that broken back. I am very suspicious of that plug-in and how it impacts Outlook/Exchange behavior with an unreliable network.

[8] This is typical of whenever I regenerate Outlook's OST file. Something old always reappears, it's never been important. Bugs.

[9] I do them one at a time exiting Outlook after each one.

[10] Outlook 2003's Shorcut pane is a "pain in the ***". So dumb, yet so essential in a complex Outlook configuration.

[11] This is why WDS is not an option.

[12] This is the default setting, but I always change it. Not this time apparently.

Update 9/28/07: Wow. Microsoft is in such bad shape. After all of the above I discovered Windows Desktop Search wasn't working properly -- in ways to diverse and complex to document here.

I found that Microsoft has two somewhat different products they call "Windows Desktop Search". If you Google on WDS you will find the product they aim at the corporate sector. Don't get that version (so called "3.1").

I ended up uninstalling WDS-Corporate-individual user 3.1 I installed the version you get with Windows Live toolbar..

1. Install Windows Live Toolbar
2. This should install the right version of WDS. If not use "toolbar options" and "install buttons" to find and download WDS...

The version number of the "good" WDS looks like an IP address ...

Update 10/23/07: The saga continued with some improvements as noted above, but then the flakiness returned. In particular Outlook would exit with a hung process, and I'd lose network access. My employer has larded up my system with various inventory services, but, mercifully, does let me disable services. I kept working through the list, disabling various XP services but with little impact. I reviewed my list installed software, and uninstalled various apps I don't use. That' when I noticed a very suspicious Yahoo updater (don't you hate that every damned app has its own update infrastructure?) -- removing that did seem to help my startup time!

The error frequency grew, and it became apparent there was a hardware component to the debacle -- one that wasn't showing up in XP's event logs.

I hate hardware failures -- especially those the OS can't detect.

I replaced the hard drive on the general principle that drive failures are common. If that doesn't work it's time to test memory and even the video memory.

Windows Live Writer is out of beta

The best blogging tool on any platform is now out of beta:

Finally Final! « whateverblog

We’re thrilled to bring you the final version of Windows Live Writer 2008–our first non-beta release!

It's an excellent product. Ecto 3 beta is probably the closest OS X alternative, and it's much less robust than WLW (editor is buggy, it doesn't download a full tag set, etc).

Free, too. I use it extensively with Blogger and Sharepoint 2007.

Don't miss the Firefox integration. (Unsurprisingly that doesn't appear on the Live.com page, but surprisingly it does exist.)

Microsoft's amazing WLW team also did Onfolio?!

I was happily scanning the release notes for the sure-to-excel WLW 2009 release when I came across a surprise note ...

Windows Live Writer 2009 RC released « whateverblog.

... On a more reflective note, this was the first full milestone (Beta to RC) we did without Charles Teague, our dev lead and voice of reason since the earliest days of Onfolio...

Onfolio is the only Windows app besides Windows Live Writer that I use and admire. I'm quite sad that Microsoft bought it only to kill it.

So one team did both products.

They must be Minnesotans.

I hope Microsoft is paying 'em very well!

Windows Live Writer cursed by Google's bugs

You know you're in a new era when Microsoft is the humble good guy doing the noble thing, and Google is the arrogant foe of justice.

Google's hacked-together Blogger-Picasa pseudo-integration breaks when image-containing posts authored using Windows Live Writer are migrated to a personalized domain or to an ftp site.

The honorable WLW team has put together a partial solution, but really this is Google's bug.

I'm a longtime user of both Blogger and Picasa. Google is not wasting any of their billions on funding those products. I'd guess it's some manifestation of old-style revenue-funding business discipline. Personally, I'd prefer Google sell both properties to someone who's willing to fund them. I'm more than willing to pay for value delivered; Google's low-cost B-team funding approach is really annoying.

Make Firefox 3 beta accept the Windows Live Writer Blog This extension

Update 8/20/08: See the last update for the new way to do this.

I can't get the changes I've made to WLW's rfd file, per Joe Cheng's (WLW engineering) blog, to do anything. I'm hoping Joe will have some advice, but, in any case, the illustrious WLW team is promising an update to the "Blog Ths in Windows Live Writer" Add-on. I might just wait for that.

I ended up installing the Firefox Nightly Tester Tools add-on. Then I removed all non-compatible add-ons except for WLW (note I'd already uninstalled Google Web Accelerator), then I clicked the over-ride compatibility button in the test tools options. That worked.

Update 5/27: Joe Cheng's (WLW engineering) blog has a post about a finer grained workaround. Joe also promises to update the extension soon. I continue to be amazed that the WLW team is supporting Firefox use. (Tip via Brandon T. I subscribe to Joe's blog, so I should have caught his posting. I need to check out Bloglines and see if I've somehow lost his feed ...)

Update 8/18/08: At the end of July Joe updated his post. Note the renaming install.rdf trick to force Firefox to refresh its version. The advice now works, but it's also becoming obvious that Microsoft manage understands the value of WLW, and is no longer interested in maintaining a plug-in that supports Mozilla Firefox.

Windows Live Writer: Firefox integration

There's a Firefox extension that allows you to  "Blog This to Windows Live Writer". It works very well with Microsoft's unequalled blog authoring tool, I've been using it for months now, but these usage instructions are handy:

The Blog This gesture is available in two places: the toolbar button, and the right-click menu. I tried to be a little smart about what you are trying to blog. If you have a selection active in the browser, it’ll be used for the contents of your post. If you right-click on an image or link and select Blog This, that’s what’ll be used.

The "announcement" post this came from was reposted in error today -- the original came out last year. Even so, it's a good reminder of this terrific extension. The odd thing is that Microsoft offers it at all -- WLW is so good it could have forced me (very reluctantly) to switch to IE [1]. On the Mac WLW is threatening to force me to run FF/WLW within an Win2K VM!

Here's the download link for the released version. As I've noted before I used to have problems making it work, but they went away ...

[1] I only have two nits with WLW. One is that it's a modern .NET app, so it's slow to launch on all but the fastest machines and uses a lot of memory. Secondly, it quits after use, or stays open with the post remaining. I'd rather after each post it stayed resident but closed the post window -- in part because it's so slow to launch. (Maybe that's one nit?)

A workaround for image uploading to Microsoft’s Sharepoint Wiki.

There are some good things to say about Microsoft’s Sharepoint based Wiki.

There’s also, sadly, one very bad thing. The approach to image embedding is lousy.

Happily I have found a convoluted workaround that uses one of my favorite apps – Windows Live Writer …

1. Create a SP blog that will hold the images that will be referenced in the wiki.
2. Use Windows Live Writer to post to the wiki-image-blog. Drop your image into WLW, resize it as needed, etc. If you like, use WLW to write your image associated wiki text first draft as well.
3. After you post to the Wiki, copy and paste image and text into the Wiki editor rich text field.

This takes surprisingly little time, far less than any other option I've read of. I admit, it is convoluted!

Update 1/11/09: I've been doing this for a while now. It's bloody brilliant, even if I have to say so myself. You can take advantage of the wiki-image-blog to attach a bit of metadata, including labels, to help with image reuse. If you read this and know anyone using Sharepoint 2007, I suggest send this on to them. They'll be forever grateful.

Ecto 3 - still breaking my heart

I'm a huge fan of Windows Live Writer.

There's only one problem with WLW. The first W.

So I've long hoped someone would clone WLW for OS X. It doesn't have to be as good as the original, a reasonable clone would be a joy.

Unfortunately, the closest thing to WLW for OS X is ecto, and I'm saddened to find it hasn't changed since October of 2007.

It still has one fatal flaw for use with Blogger. It requires that Blogger blogs have "convert line feeds" disabled.

If that feature is enabled (default behavior) then Ecto posts have extra line feeds. If it's disabled existing posts lose their paragraph formatting.

There are other issues with Ecto, such as the way it retrieves Labels (it just looks at Labels on recent posts), but this one is a killer.

Won't anyone please try to clone Windows Live Writer? I mean, I know there's no market out there but ...

Oh, right. No market.

Annals of abandoned Windows desktop feed readers: Onfolio, Omea ...

Microsoft bought the superb Onfolio product a few years back, but they gave up on it in favor of the feed reader built into Outlook 2007 (miserable piece of ****) and the feed reader built into IE 7 (weak, but workable, heaven forfend don't sync it to Outlook's feed pool).

Alas, Onfolio has a .NET DLL-like conflict with Windows Live Writer (and you thought DLL-Hell was gone?). Since Onfolio is dead, and since I live by WLW (same team did Onfolio!), I again looked for a Windows feed reader I could use with our corporate sharepoint feeds.

I thought I'd give the once well regarded Omea Reader a try. It sure sounded a lot like Onfolio, and it didn't carry the baggage of Omeo Pro (which is far more than I want).

Omea Reader did a great job importing my Onfolio OPML file, including retaining the folder structure. I did run into a number of bugs and UI glitches though, so I figured I'd check on the development status.

Cough.

This is what shows up in the Feeds view (the originating web site is now gone) from March 2008:

Dear JetBrains Omea Users,

We are pleased to finally come to you with these news.

We know that many of you were waiting for this to happen for so long, and we would like to thank you for your patience.

So, after several months of thorough work on polishing the software itself and its API, we are happily ready to announce the full availability of our "Omea" line of products in their open-source incarnation.

We hope that this step will allow us to rise the development of this great product to a new level and to attract energy and talents of everybody who likes to participate in this "adventure"...

By "adventure" they probably mean "hell-ride that nearly destroyed our company". Things were happier in 2005 ...

... In the February, 2005 issue of Home Computer Magazine (www.homecomputermagazine.com/), Omea Reader was announced as their Five Star Pick for free RSS Readers. But you knew that already... isn't it nice to be proven right?...

I'll keep trying Omea, it seems more stable than Onfolio for the moment. I can't recommend a dead product to anyone else though.

I fear I'm the only one looking for a Windows feed reader, which makes me wonder if a very excellent technology isn't really going to make it this go-round ...

Update: When I do a Google search on "windows feed reader" I get exactly NO Adword advertisements. The moving finger of history has moved on.

OmniFocus for iPhone and OS X – a webdav odyssey and a really big problem with OmniFocus

(Note: Firefox 2/3/Safari 3/Blogger 2/1/draft is messing up my post formatting big time. I had to open this post in Windows Live Writer (yay!) to repair it. It’s quite an impressive set of bugs we got there!)

This post has more than a couple of updates. It gives a sense of how messy this iPhone transition is going to be.

Briefly, the two immediate problems are that OmniFocus can’t import tab or csv delimited data and iPhone synchronization requires a webdav server. The second is a hassle, the first is a killer.

Here’s how it all evolved.

--

The first post

I’ve been waiting eagerly for OmniFocus desktop/iPhone. It’s a key piece of my struggle to migrate off the Palm platform.

I'm a registered OmniOutliner Pro customer, so I get a good break on the full app price. The iPhone companion is $20. It sounds like there's a way to sync with a LAN WebDav server, I'm looking forward to directions on how to do that.

To learn about OmniFocus desktop and OmniFocus/iPhone you need to first download and test the latest Sneaky Peek Build. Then pay $20 for the iPhone app. The OmniGroup is great about free upgrades, so there's no financial downside to buying both apps now if you're sure they're right for you. I know the OmniGroup will make them work -- they have the talent. I'll have some early impressions in a few days.

The First Update: After checking out the pref files in OF, it's clear you need a real webdav server. Desktop OS X can be hacked to enable Apache's webdav services, but it's too much work for me. I'm shopping around for a nice Java webdav server I can run in my user account, but I think those are oddly hard to find. OS X Server has webdav services enabled, but that's too much trouble too. I probably just need to pay for Mobile.me. I might as well have Apple deduct a monthly stipend directly from my employer ....

Update: Ok, so neither XDrive nor Windows Live Skydrive provide webdav access (box.net might?). Free webdav access is pretty much nonexistent, and even commercial solutions are not common. Resin used to be open source with a good webdav service; whatever the owners may say it feels pretty closed source now.

The W3C has a WebDav server, but it feels dusty and is very XP/Unix centric.

I used to use a WebDav service in the 90s, it really feels like WebDav has slipped away since then. Really, MobileMe might be the only practical WebDav solution outside of OS X Server! Too bad GDrive has gone missing.

So why has WebDav become so unpopular? Too easy to abuse? Insecure? It's not like we see better file sharing services around!

Update: umm ... maybe webdav services with Plone? Here's Apple's download blurb on Plone, but contrary to the description it now downloads an Intel only unified installer version 2.5.

The Plone site (use versiontracker) has a UNIX installer for version 3.1.2, you need to run terminal to install it in your user account. Since I'm only interested for now in supporting webdav sync for the iPhone from my WLAN I installed it as a regular user rather than as a root user service. Be warned, however, after compilation the install is 250MB!

I think this may also not be a fully complaint WEBDAV implementation.

A thread in the OMNI Group Forums mentioned box.net, but that service is blocked by many corporate filtering services (which supports my suspicion that the reason webdav is so hard to find is that webdav services are often used illegally).

“Final” update: Well, I installed Plone into 10.4.11 with the universal UNIX installer and edited the .conf file to enable localhost:1980 webdav services. Incredibly, 10.4.11 finder worked perfectly. Unfortunately OmniFocus didn't. At first it gave a basic can't connect error message, on retry it crashed and I sent the OmniGroup a crash report.

Final update plus: After all of the above, I find in early testing that OmniFocus has basically no data import/export capabilities I can use.

Here's what I read from an OmniGroup Forum post:

1. If your organization has any development capacity, it is not difficult to write a specialised importer using Applescript. This would give you the most efficient workflow.

2. For a quick and dirty solution in the interim, you can use search and replace to convert your CSV text into tab-delimited text, and use Omnioutliner to import that. Omnifocus can import Omnioutliner files.

Hookaayyy. I can hire a developer to write an AppleScript importer to move Outlook tasks into OmiFocus?I don't think so.

So cross out OmniFocus! I'll keep the skeleton of my original post. At least I learned something about webdav services and Plone!

Looks like it will take longer than expected to come up with a good iPhone task management solution...]

Final-Final update plus: Ken Case of OmniFocus replies in comments:

Just thought I'd mention that we're planning to add the ability to import CSV files to OmniFocus, it's just not there yet. (The priority for 1.0 was to get the basic workflow and functionality working, and the priority for the in-progress 1.1 release is synchronization. Hopefully CSV import will make it into 1.2!)By the way, here's a pointer to the best tutorial I've seen on setting up WebDAV on your Mac.

The referenced webdav directions are for 10.5 workstation Apache and are very well laid out. The directions include lines like "be sure to use sudo", so they're not written for most users. Maybe OmniFocus will write a one-click utility to enable Apache WebDav? Lastly, I work in software development, and in my world "hopefully" means -- "if we're visited by space alien coders", but the OmniGroup may operate on a higher plane.

Bottom line: I'm going to be carrying a Palm around for a long time yet.