PicturePan2 from Livesino has some new images, in his latest post, showing the most recent build of the Word Web App and of how documents appear in Hotmail.
The interface of the header, as is expected, looks tidier and more informative; I guess the “on Hotmail” will change depending on what service the Office document is being viewed on with other options such as “on SkyDrive”.
The other options that can be seen from this image are the obvious File which I imagine will contain options to save the document locally, print it etc. Edit in Browser which will open a limited number of Office 2010 like controls and options, next is the zoom control, interesting to note this isn’t in the bottom right of the browser like on the client version. On the right side is a help, full screen and close button with the option to move through pages below.
What I am still interested to know is how ubiquitous Microsoft intends to make the Web Apps, if they want Office to be as big on the internet as it is on client PCs then I will assume it will be possible to embed “read-only” versions of the Web Apps on other websites.
I believe what we see above is an image of a received email which only says “LiveSino.net”, has no subject and a word document attachment. The Hotmail Active View appears to be a new feature that shows a true icon of the attached file rather than just a tiny paper clip.
We have seen the new features of the sidebar before with Quick Views and I assume that any email with a Office document will be shown in the Documents section and any email with photos attached be shown in Photos. However what is new is the Messenger section which is very interesting not only because it looks to emulate Gmail’s IM placement within an online email service but also because I thought the new Web Messenger would be available on all Windows Live services which would remove the need to have it feature in the sidebar. one reason I can see for this section is to effectively pin favourites within Hotmail so users don’t need to open Web Messenger but can instantly see who is online from within their inbox, likely to be the Live service they spend most of their time anyway. Hotmail certainly looks placed to be the centre piece of the Windows Live online suite.
From looking at these images I am increasingly more interested in Wave 4 will add to the online services, yes the Windows Live applications are good but the online services offer much more potential if a little less functionality. I also think the slight tweaks and refinements of the UI look great with its very tidy and clean interface.
