Open Live Writer

I’ve been using MIcrosoft’s free Office Live Writer for several years – it’s a great tool for blogging. Just before Christmas, Microsoft announced that OLW was becoming Open Source and would be known as Open LIve Writer. Microsoft has foked the code and the OLW fork is now available via GitHub (https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter). Open Live Writer is provided under a MIT license.

The move to open source has not resulted in a perfect product – initially there is no spell checker in OLW. The spell checker included in the OLW is old, and the license would not have allowed it to be released as open source. The team plan to update OLW to use the Windows 8 (and later) built in spell checker. Unfortunately this probably means no spell checking for Windows 7 users.

You can find more informatiou about OLW at the web site: http://openlivewriter.org/. This pagecontans a download link, along with details of the proejct, participants, etc. The code itself, along with a nice product road map are published over on the GitHub site noted above.

This is a great idea – thanks for saving this neat bit of software.