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Wave 4: What’s New in Windows Live Essentials

By on May 23, 2010 5:46 PM
32 comments

Windows Live EssentialsFollowing the announcement of Messenger and Hotmail Wave 4, the next step for Microsoft’s Windows Live Wave 4 announcement is the new Essentials. Today the Windows Live Essentials Preview website (http://windowslive.com/essentials) briefly went online for a short while before locking out all users with a login ID and password again. Fortunately, we were able to capture some of the information from the website, and just like before, we only chose those that we think might most interest you (those marked with Star are new ones we haven’t mentioned before, other ones we have conveniently linked you to our previous coverage):

Windows Live Photo Gallery

  • Multitouch Support Star Photos can be adjusted using touch on any touch-enabled Windows 7-based PC.
  • Libraries support Star Photo Gallery now supports Windows 7 Libraries so you don’t have to manually import photos and videos again, it’s all done automatically.
  • Intuitive user interface If you use Windows or Office, you’ll be right at home with Windows Live Photo Gallery and Movie Maker because they use the same ribbon toolbar that puts all the right tools at your fingertips for easy access and efficiency.
  • Find tab Photo Gallery’s new Find tab allows you to naturally filter your photos by faces, names, date, geo-location, descriptive tags, folder titles or any combination. Finally, it’s easy to take your million and one photos and find that one in a million.
  • Facial Recognition Facial Recognition technology allows Photo Gallery to find pictures that have people in them and deduce who is in those pictures based on whom you’ve tagged in the past. The more you tag, the smarter it gets! Tags made in Photo Gallery travel with the photo wherever it goes, and any tags you or your friends make on sites such as Facebook also sync back down to your Photo Gallery.
  • Photo Fuse Allows you to take the best parts of multiple photos to combine them into one “perfect” photo with an easy-to-use editing tool.
  • Retouch Star Whether it’s a blemish, scratch, bruise or stain, Photo Gallery’s Retouch feature enables you to make it look like it never happened, employing the same technology that professional agencies use to polish photos.
  • Batch Auto Adjust Star Make professional adjustments in seconds with Auto Adjust. In a matter of moments, your photos will receive a fine-tuning to their exposure, color balance and sharpness, so you end.

Windows Live Movie Maker

  • AutoMovie Themes Create polished movies with your photos and videos that you can then share, even if you don’t have a lot of time. AutoMovie will add a beautiful theme to your photos and videos in less than a minute that includes transitions, a title, captions and a music soundtrack. You can use these same themes in Photo Gallery’s Slideshow mode. up with a professional-quality finished product.

Mail logo

  • Efficient inbox management tools Tools such as conversation threading give you the convenience of viewing your messages in the way that you choose. Quick views organize and find selected types of mail (unread mail from contacts only, flagged email, all mail across inboxes, etc.) across your email accounts, newsgroups and feeds.
  • Slim Cal Instantly view your calendar without navigating away from the context of your inbox.

Windows Live Sync

  • Sync folders across all your PCs (and Macs) Windows Live Sync keeps your files and folders, such as Documents, Pictures and
    Music, in sync across your computers so you can work or play wherever you want. Update a file on one computer, and it wi
    ll automatically sync to the rest. Once your folders are synchronized, your files are available even when you don’t have internet access.
  • Program settings sync Star Share settings for your favorite programs across your PCs, so programs work the same way on every PC in your home.
  • Remote Desktop Star Leave your PC online and you can access it from devices.live.com. Find your PC among the list of devices on the website, and click Connect to remotely control your PC.

Note that this list is in no way reflective of all of the new features coming in Windows Live Essentials Wave 4. But nevertheless, they’re the official words from Microsoft! Stay tuned at LiveSide.net as we bring you more information about Windows Live Essentials Wave 4!

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Comments

  • JohnCz

    Slim Cal, interesting..I don’t think we heard of this before. Its good to hear that they are keeping the Live Mesh remote desktop capability.

    • Damaster – LiveSide.net

      “Slim Cal” is just a fancy name of the new Calendar pane on the right of the new Windows Live Mail Wave 4 inbox view. Hence I didn’t put a star next to it.

  • SDreamer

    Ah, looking great, really can’t wait for all these features. Photo Gallery seems to be on par now with iPhoto and other competitors. I’m really looking forward to Facial Recognition. Also can’t wait for the tabbed messaging on WLM. I really hope IMAP makes it to Hotmail. Doesn’t exchange protocols come with IMAP as well?

  • nikhil85

    Can we access devices.live.com through any device like mobile.!! Is sync only possible on pc/ Mac not on Mobile devices.!!

    • Chris

      Nice point. There used to be Live Mesh for Mobile which was nice until the stopped allowing sign ups. Microsoft’s MyPhone just doesn’t even compare and is not even integrated with Windows Live (Shame.)

      The mobile device still appears to be the step child in Wave4

      • JohnCz

        Just guessing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if MyPhone is replaced with Windows Live SkyDrive.

  • http://twitter.com/Insomniac86 Aaron Harvey

    Its just getting better and better. No wonder why Wave 4 is taking ages.
    Its starting to offer more features that Windows 7 did over Vista!
    At least they are really cleaning up the platform and services.

    Now the only thing they need to do is keep it clean.

  • Chris

    Seriously hope they do not discontinue Windows Live Spaces. Or if they do, give a way to export over 4 years worth of blog posts.

    • http://macrosofter.wordpress.com/ quikboy

      I hope so too. It’d be a shame to see Spaces expunged because of negilence from the Windows Live team. It’d be a greater shame if they didn’t give us an easy way of backing up those posts that we worked pretty hard on.

  • Andrew

    Movie maker is still disappointing. Its too simple.

    • jtmat

      Move maker is great for free.

      If you need more, http://www.TechSmith.com has Camtasia. Camtasia is excellent.

      • Andrew

        Windows Movie Maker in Windows XP and Vista was 1000 times better with features. I don’t see why they can’t keep that with Windows Live Movie Maker.

        • Alex

          The reason is because Windows Live Movie Maker was built from the ground up and has Direct2D integration. My guess is you will now see all of the 3D effects from PowerPoint integrated because PowerPoint 2010 just integrated Direct2D into the transitions as well.

    • Chris

      Agreed. What ever happened to TIME LINE view? If your going to make a movie, you need time line view.

  • Asrialys

    Libraries support is what got people upset with the last Zune software update :/

    • Mario Albertico

      Yep, everything was all screwed up when that happened to me. Thankfully I knew what had caused it and was able to clean up the mess, but I sure prayed for those who had no idea what hit them… It’s not that it’s a bad way of keeping content managed, but when your content is initially organized in a specific folder hierarchy fashion, switching everything to a Library based method can be very tricky if you have specific locations for saving new content that do not align with the “Default save location” newly selected within the Library.

  • Mario Albertico

    Photo Gallery definitely does keep getting better and better. It would be nice if they appreciated the other media type just as much with Movie Maker. As for Sync, “Program settings sync” looks very interesting. I imagine, if it works well, a perfectly synced Windows Live Mail client experience across two computers (without having to enter login info for the 6 accounts I have loaded). This can almost lead to the kind of fluid consistent PC experience Microsoft touts when a user regularly uses more than one PC. Very much like an always-active Windows Easy Transfer session between multiple computers…

  • anonymous

    My only beef is that the “Back to Gallery” button is not an all of the Ribbon tabs in Photo Gallery. Makes navigation difficult.

    • chrilo

      There is a small shortcut bar on the top of every ribbon interface, so I think it would be no problem to pin “Back to the Gallery” to this bar.

  • Garion

    Just Curious,

    Do you think that media player should be part of the live services too?

    To me it makes sense, having Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Media Player? It could buy out some sort of streaming website and have any music stored on your sky drive streamed over the web or other devices?

    • JohnCz

      If the required bandwidth was available on the cheap, I think more consumers would opt to stream directly from the music store(s) itself. Zune already supports this and I suppose consumers will become aware of it when Windows Phone 7 devices arrive later this. Also, Windows Home Server is much better suited to handle large media libraries and with v2, you can stream video/audio remotely using its built in Silverlight player. It will dynamically adjust bitrate depending on the bandwidth available between remote device and WHS.

    • Chris

      Perhaps. May be even the zune Software.

      but media player 12 is one of the worse peaces of software I ever used.

  • chrilo

    I just figured out, that MS does not protect the videos of windows live essentials, so just copy into your browser:

    http://www.windowslivepreview.com/videos/LibraryVideoLarge.aspx?video=297

    and try some different numbers, i’ve tried 297-200 so far.

  • adriannethercott

    I really hope that they’ve added an overlay icon over the Windows Live Mail icon with the number of unread emails (like the mail app in OS X). I didn’t see that feature in the leaked build and I haven’t seen any mention of it.

    • Revolutions

      I’m pretty sure they haven’t.

    • JohnCz

      You mean like the Live Toolbar has/did. I would like to see the Hotmail button updated in Bing Bar. In general, Bing Bar needs a major update before rolling out Essentials. But you are right, for those who run WLM all the time, the superbar icon should do the same thing.

  • http://www.facebook.com/khris Khristopher Ranger

    The remote desktop is pretty damn sweet! I can see that coming in handy.

  • Chris

    Finally Photo Gallery won’t look cheep. The current one has a few graphic glitches.

  • http://www.jason-saggers.com Jason Saggers

    I dont have any use for any of these features.
    messenger is now bloated.
    I shouldn’t be talking because I use Miranda.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=551119507 Brent Vermilyea

      Yeah, Messenger is definitely expanding–literally. The good news if you don’t do social networks or you don’t want to manage them through Messenger, you can have the client software look and act much like it does today.

      And the truth is, while Messenger may seem like it’s feature overload, that’s also one reason why it’s so popular: it does about everything.

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