Microsoft Writer: the best, and possibly as good as a paid alternative. I’ve never been as happy with a MS product since… Notepad. Writer will remind seasoned users of Frontpage, while newbies will be right at home with the simplicity of the application.
Best features: can synchronise posts; supports most blogging platforms; ease of use; plugins available
Let-downs: some issues(see end of this post)
There’s also the Flock blog editor, the built-in blog editor of the socially-friendly browser, Flock; and ScribeFire, the able Firefox plugin. It’s always a merry occasion when you have a blog editor right inside your browser, and ScribeFire even comes with useful options ranging from an inbuilt revenue-earning system and one-click posting to advanced pinging options.
But if you ask me, at the end of the day Writer wins hand down for its user-friendliness and solid synchronization.
Known quirks: many of the plugins for Writer (there aren’t really many, surprisingly) don’t work; others are plain scratchy. Among the ones broke are the ones made by the Microsoft devs themselves (not so surprising, eh?). Formatting often doesn’t agree either; take a look:
The original post in Blogger has a line break, which Writer fails to reflect. From my experience, I’ve had trouble synchronising posts with both Flock and ScribeFire. They also support fewer blogging platforms compared to Writer; and although ScribeFire in particular has some interesting features, both applications essentially feel like plugins, and lack the necessary MS Word-like seamlessness one would look for in a blog editor.
[Update: I had just published this from Writer where the post turned out like this. I had to dig into the code -- a simple matter of tags getting mixed up -- to fix it.]