New Windows Live Writer – Microsoft Makes Mistakes

If you can read this, I’m publishing it from the new beta of Windows Live Writer. Sadly, the first two things I’m going to say about this tool are:

Why the hell do I need administrative privileges to install a blog authoring tool?
The installer tries to change my browser homepage: that’s a no-no.

Come on Microsoft, you know better than this, and you have smart people working there. Why look like such an amateur?

[tags]windows live writer, wlw, microsoft, ui, softwaredesign[/tags]

http://www.techcraver.com Jason

Hey Aaron,

i totally agree. I don’t understand why companies assume they can take other parts of our machines over – it sucks.

-Jason
http://jtdabbagian.wordpress.com J.T Dabbagian

Dude, it’s Microsoft. It’s their OS, so they think they can do whatever they want.

Actually, Live Writer isn’t a bad piece of work.
http://jcheng.wordpress.com Joe Cheng [MSFT]

> Why the hell do I need administrative privileges to install a blog authoring tool?

We register some COM components to allow Blog This from the browser and from feed readers, and they don’t seem to work right under Vista unless they are installed under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, not HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

> The installer tries to change my browser homepage: thatâ€™s a no-no.

I have no comment on that, now excuse me while I go back to banging my head against my desk.