Microsoft released the 1.0 version of Windows Live writer this week, which wasn’t much of a change on the last beta, just a couple of new features, including spellchecking for English (US, UK, Canadian), French, German & Spanish and support for AtomPub.  Good though, I’m glad they’re supporting it & not left it in perpetual beta.  Especially since WordPress updated to allow tag creation based on WLW keywords, WLW has become hugely useful for me.

I’m still not a huge fan of the whole Live.com web interface, it just looks a bit weird to me.  Oh well, I can’t really talk about quality design skills anyway.

Also released was the ability to sign up for a live.com (.au/.uk/.etc..) email address.  When I first went to the signup page it set me up as a .co.uk user, I guess because I’ve got my language set as British English somewhere.  Easy to fix though, just change the mkt=en-uk to mkt=en-au.  Not really a user-friendly option though, but I couldn’t find any other way to change it from that page.

Creating the account was a bit buggy for me too, I had to try 4 times before it worked (got an error message about signup having problems.  Well duh!).

Anyway, it finally worked, I’ve got a live.com.au email address. 

No link on that page to tell you what to do next though, I had to type in http://www.live.com/ to get back to something useful. Again, I’m guessing non-tech people are not going to know what to do though. Come on MS, it’s the little details that make the difference!

Don’t know how much I’ll use this address, seeing as I’ve already got gmail & my own domain, but I wanted one anyway!  I do like the fact that I can link my old hotmail address into the new live account in live mail, that is quite handy.  I’ve downloaded the Live Mail client to see what it’s like.  It still has newsgroup support, how quaint :)  I haven’t used newsgroups thorough a nntp server for years, Google Groups kind of made that redundant.

Oh well, I’ll give it a shot anyway.  At any rate I’m going to change my MSN messenger account to the new live.com.au address anyway.