In August, changes to the gallery for Windows Live Writer were announced. This caused some concern that Live Writer was going away. We talked to John Thornton, the Lead Program Manager for Windows Live Writer, to get the real story.
According to John, the changes to the gallery have nothing to do with Windows Writer itself. Rather, it has to do with the future of gallery.live.com. By having developers move their applications out of the gallery and onto Windows Live SkyDrive, they are preparing to a new gallery that is only going to contain Writer plug-ins and is maintained solely by the Live Writer team.
John Thornton continues,
As far as the death of Writer it's silly speculation that has been going on for a long time. We have a great team working on the product and we are confident that this latest version of Writer is the best version yet. Part of the story that never gets told is that the Writer team now also makes the editing surface for Windows Live Mail. Mail users now benefit from the rich Writer editor including features like all the photo effects and photo album tools. Contrary to popular belief we haven't been sitting around planning Writers demise and doing nothing for 18 months. In fact we have diligently been improving our editing canvas with fixes that are now benefiting both Mail and Writer. At the same time we have upgraded Writer's UX with ribbon, fixed many important customer found bugs and added features like new album templates, emoticons, improved copy/paste support and better theme detection. Is there more we want to do? Of course and that is where we have always relied on our plugin model and the community to help out.
Information on creating plugins for Windows Live Writer is available on MSDN. Though it shares components with Live Writer, Live Mail doesn’t offer a plug-in model.