What do I love about Firefox 2.0? The autoupdate is sublime. The other day, I was automatically upgraded to Performancing 1.3.5. I started Firefox and it loaded right in. Fast load, no sweat whatsoever.
I was happy to be a very early adopter of Performancing and still find it's in-line UI (where it lives as an overlay in the browser and lets you browse while blogging)
I'm going to go through the list and talk a bit about the new features.
Additions and Fixes:
1) Better Spell-check support in Firefox 2.0. Both Rich and normal
editing now have spell-check, along with bug fixes and you can now
switch easily between different languages provided you have more than one dictionary installed
Jim: Inline spell check is very important for blogging. Blogging is often done hastily and having the in-line spell checker simplifies the process. Windows Live Writer does not do in-line spell check. I'm sure it will at some point, but now you write the whole blog entry and then go back and run spell check. This might not sound bad, but when you write an entire entry with words like iPod and iRiver and other stupid names - you end up stopping at each one. And, yes, I know I can add it to the dictionary. With in-line spell check you can ignore the underlines as you type.
8) Prevent duplicate tag and 'powered by ...' insertion in posts.
Jim: Seems trivial, but this is great. I was often going back and deleting the second ones.
9) Experimental newMediaObject image and file uploading. For blog
systems that support image uploads (MT, wordpress, Drupal, etc.) You
can now try the 'Upload Via API' button in the image uploading window.
Please note this is experimental, if you have issues or it works for
you, please let us know so we can improve it.
Jim: I haven't been able to try this yet. Typepad has been having problems this morning. Here's a suggestion, though. I'd like you to be able to cut and paste media or drag and drop it into your post. The newMediaObject utility will then take all new content in the blog post and perform whatever action you have prescribed for it. The main reason I've been using Windows Live Writer over Performancing lately is how Windows Live Writer handles images. Images are important to me and waiting for them to upload before viewing them is frustrating.
Other notes:
I see there's still a link to Metrics even though Performancing is considering giving the code to the community and shutting down the service. Sad to see it go.
I also want more control over my links. In many other blogging tools I can provide link descriptions and have links launch in new windows. Performancing still makes me edit the HTML for that.
Conclusion:
In the end, even with the new Performancing image upload features, I'm still going to keep using Windows Live Writer because of its seemless image incorporation.
UPDATE: Also, notice above the misformatting from the blockquotes. Performancing always does this. This is the only thing is totally hate about Performancing and wish it would stop.
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powered by performancing firefox
I have had middling satisfaction with Performancing - while I find it spectacularly convenient and spiffy, it 'stops' working every once in a while, leastways with my Blogger blog - I get the cryptic 'Failed to contact Atom server' message, and the extension needs to be reinstalled - which is too many clicks:)
Posted by: Aaman | 15 November 2006 at 23:44