Microsoft Live Essentials 2011 has just released and I have been spending some time with the application that I use primarily from that software suite, Live Writer. While the new interface is more consistent with Office 2010 style, there is one feature that they have taken away that really causes me decreased productivity when I am writing my blog posts.
I love to use a program from TechSmith called Jing which allows me to easily capture portions of the screen to insert back into documents that I am working with. What I used to be able to do was to grab the portion of the screen and save it to the clipboard and then I could paste that image into the program of my choice. Live Writer has stopped allowing me to paste a graphic image into the article I am working with. Now, you have to insert a graphic image from file which causes me several extra steps of saving the captured image to my computer, going back to Live Writer and insert the picture, and then jumping back to the file to erase it because I don't need to hold it locally since it is sitting in the cloud at my ScreenCast Account.
Your ribbon bar does provide context sensitive support as you see from the image above which popped up when I highlighted a picture. The image support seems pretty good once you get the image inserted in your document.
It will be interesting to see what other add-ins will be come available and how fast they become available. While the overall look and feel provides me with more consistency with Office 2010 features I know that it is going to be a while before I feel comfortable with this new version.