First off, this post is not bought to you via Windows Live Writer! Why? Well..
Running a 64bit OS is an interesting experience. A lot of people will make casual comments along the lines of "pretty much everything should run fine". If you hear this phrase in casual social conversation, then chances are that:
- You are a huge fucking geek
- You are talking to someone who has never run a 64bit OS
Most 32bit apps are compatiable with a 64bit OS. However there are some things you take for granted, and sometimes compatiability can be an issue. For example, in my previous XP setup I was running a theme called "Longhorn Slate/Plex", which required a quick patch to be applied to your themes.dll. This sort of thing is obviously OS specific, and it makes sense that it doesn't work on a 64bit version. It's at this point that you become thankful to anyone who has written system/OS related software that you rely on (such as
Ultramon) and has written a 64bit version.
I was still surprised to find that some applications which you would have thought safe don't run on 64bit Windows. An example is Windows Live Writer. Luckily Microsoft have a pretty good explanation about this:
Windows Live Family Safety software does not run on 64-bit versions of Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Well I'm satisfied with that explanation, how about you?
Windows Live Writer is something I meant to write a little bit about when I switched to Subtext. I'd read a few other people write their obligitory "I'm writing this with Windows Live Writer!" posts, and so had sceptically tried it out, only to find that it's pretty damn good. No matter how good in browser text editors get, I'm always scared by the concept of writing something in a browser. This is coming from someone who leaves a browser running for weeks sometimes, often containing tabs of information which I want to keep and not lose, so it's quite ironic at how concerned I'm always feeling while writing inside one. WIndows Live Writer got around all that, as well as adding a lot more features. It was nice to be able to start up a single app in order to deal with multiple sites, and to have in app support for things like Tagging, as well as the option to write my own custom templates if I wanted. Simply put, I was sold on Windows Writer pretty easily and pretty quickly.
And now I'm without it. Temporarily I hope.