After many months of waiting, expecting and hoping the latest version of version of Windows Live Essentials is on our PCs, if its not you should download it. Many of you will have kept up with what is new in the suite of the applications but for those that haven’t I shall brush over some of the best features of the applications in this post.
In generally you will immediately notice that Microsoft have brought the ribbon interface to many of the applications which I find to be absolutely excellent. There are two applications that don’t use this interface though, Messenger and Sync, both of which appear to use a Metro inspired interface, that isn’t to say it is completely like the Zune software.
Messenger
When first starting Messenger you will notice some different things from previous versions, a greater focus on social interactions through other social networks like Facebook. By connecting you Windows Live account with your Facebook one you are able to have a single contact list from various social networks and have updates from them appear in the social pane in Messenger allowing you to see what your friends are doing across the web in a single place. The social stream can be customised somewhat by choosing who your favourite contacts are which then makes their updates appear in the highlights section.
Another great new feature of Messenger is tabbed conversations which has been a long time coming but is finally here. Its surprising how useful this is until you come to use it quite a lot.
Then there are some less obvious features of Messenger such as high definition video chat which, providing you have a HD web cam, allows you to chat with friends in more detail than ever before, its even possible to leave someone a video message if they aren’t online. Integration of Bing results within conversation windows to allow users to quickly add images, videos etc into a conversation.
Aside from the Ribbon interface in Mail there are some obvious changes in the way of emails being sorted with a conversation view which groups all the emails from a contact into a single group which makes following a conversation much easier, its possible to turn this off; emails now support flagging too. On the right hand side of the window is a new “slim cal” which brings the calendar functionality of the Mail program into the inbox.
Microsoft have worked hard on making sharing media much easier in the new version of Essentials and in Mail it’s now possible to create a photo email which stores up to 200 images on SkyDrive rather than sending them and clogging up people’s inboxes. The photos can then be viewed or downloaded by the recipient from a very nicely formatted email.
Writer
I, like many others, think that the new version of Writer got the least amount of attention from Microsoft compared to the other applications in the suite. However it is now possible to embed photos in new ways, one mimicking the photo email look of Mail and results from Bing searches can be easily embedded into blog posts. Perhaps the best update to the application is extremely tiny but brilliant, when adding a link to a post the address is auto-filled from the clipboard.
Movie Maker
You might remember that the current version of Movie Maker is not even a year old and features the ribbon interface so this wont appear too different for many users. Microsoft have added quite a few more transition effects, auto movie themes, greater editing functionality and more options for publishing and sharing.
Photo Gallery
There are many new features and improvements in Photo Gallery with the major ones being facial recognition and auto tagging which gets smarter as more faces are tagged. There is a new find tab that introduces several filters and tags that can all be used together to allow any photo to be found.
The application now features some new ways to edit photos including batch edit, Photo Fuse which allows users to merge the bits from several photos of the same thing to create one perfect photo and retouch which allows users to edit small blemishes etc on photos.
Other additions to the application include multitouch support and Windows 7 Libraries integration.
Sync
Sync features in the Wave 3 version of Windows Live but it has undergone a massive transformation in Wave 4. The application now replaces Live Mesh making use of the technologies of the synchronisation program which allows users to sync files and folders across many PCs and even storing them in the cloud on Windows Live SkyDrive; however only 2GB of data can be stored in SkyDrive and it is a separate section of the online storage service. Sync also features Live Mesh’s remote desktop functionality but also brings a new feature that syncs program settings across a user’s PC, this currently only shares program settings for Office and Internet Explorer.
Windows Live Wave 4 is an excellent, if overdue, update the suite of applications and when combined with the online Windows Live services there is very little competition for the Windows Live service. I have found these applications to be quicker on my PC and the images on the Messenger social pane look stunning.
I will be interested to know what you think of these updates and your experiences with them applications.
Well then I guess we should now start to look for Windows Live Wave 5 news…
Current images are from the Windows Live Preview site not my own.
