Windows Live Wave 4 is seemingly approaching at a rapid speed, based on the web services already making an appearance, which means soon (who knows when) the Essentials beta will begin and the public will be able to get their greedy hands on the new bits and pieces. Exciting times.

Until then, however, you’ll have to try and make do with a post from me with some screenshots and a look at some of the things that come with Wave 4 Live Writer. I will also be putting up a mini review a bit later, but first, lets have a look at her shall we.

The Interface

The noticeable change with Wave 4 is the move to the Ribbon UI that we’ve all come to love and hate with Office:

With the addition of the Ribbon, it does mean goodbye to the quick links on the right where you could access your previously published posts and drafts. You may also notice from the screenshot that the post properties bar that lived at the bottom is now at the top of the post, I’m being told that this was because of customer feedback asking for the ability to do things that they could already do, they just didn’t look at the bottom.

For those worried about screen real estate with the ribbon, this can be minimised by right clicking on the ribbon:

Which leaves you with:

New Options

There aren’t too many new options, although there are some minor changes. Live Writer used to have a feature that autosaved every x minutes based on your chosing, this has now changed from autosave to autorecovery. What does this mean exactly? Well if for whatever reason Writer, Windows, or whatever crashes and takes Live Writer with it, then when you next start Writer, you should then be able to access this post. It does the autorecover saving every 15 seconds, so you should lose only the minimal amount of a blog post should the unthinkable happen.

That is about it for any new options.

New Plug-in

Sadly, this isn’t a new plug-in architecture, just a new default plug-in. We’ve seen the screenshots before that show the new Messenger emoticons are being put in Writer:

What is quite cool about this one though (which is something my original plug-in could never do) and that is it automatically inserts your emoticon when you do one of the familiar shortcodes .

The Video window now only lets you upload to Youtube, removing the option to upload to the now defunct SoapBox.

Performance

I’m being told that the Writer team have made vast improvements on load time and general performance over that of Wave 3, I personally haven’t noticed any difference to be honest, but I’m running it on a slightly meatier than average machine.

Review

I’ll be posting my review of the new Live Writer shortly, once I’ve given you adequate time to digest this post.