- Posted by sondreb on December 19, 2008
-
Microsoft is getting closer to the final release of Windows Live Essentials 2009 and here are my discoveries from the release candidate that was recently made available.
If you don’t care about reading my review, go over to Live and download WLE2009 at http://download.live.com/
Introduction
I have always had an interest in the Windows Live platform of tools and services. I have followed the evolution of it and covered it previously on my blog. Where does this interest come from?
If you are like me, you might be using the tools provided by the Windows Live platform. I use them every single day and they are very much essential for me to be able to communicate effectively, blog more easily, read my e-mails, follow up on other blogs and organize my tens of thousand of photos that I have stored on my Windows Home Server. So yes, I have a profound interest in the quality and features of Windows Live Essentials (WLE from now on) and it’s services.
While I won’t go into a big comparison between the previous beta and the new release candidate, I will show some screenshots on the difference where it makes sense.
Let’s first start with a screenshot of the unified installer for WLE. You can see the full list of tools in the screenshot below and in the release candidate they included the Microsoft Office Live Add-in, which is an add-in that extends Office with better support for opening and saving documents to your Office Live Workspace. Additionally there is a Microsoft Office Outlook Connector that enables you to see your Hotmail account (e-mails and calendars) from within Outlook. I’m betting on Microsoft adding Windows Live Sync to the family of WLE sooner or later and Family Safety is something I won’t cover for another years :-)
Windows Live Essentials
The whole WLE is a package of many separate tools, developed (probably) by different teams at Microsoft. It’s obvious they don’t use the same UI-library for all of them and they do have some subtle differences that becomes apparent when you use them. While I understand the difficulties of managing the whole suite and making sure that everyone is on the same page, I think it’s important to do a good job when they have decided to make this into a seamless suite of tools. I want the toolbars and menus to have the exact same look, style and possibilities, whether it’s Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Mail – you get the idea.
Going back to the beta versions, the differences was bigger and everything has become more unified now. Things will probably be even better when the final versions is released. First thing first, the suite has some beautiful new icons!
One of the biggest feedback that I see a lot of people is having, is the lack of icons and visual indicators. Everything is being “cleaned up” and Microsoft’s comment is that they want to focus on the content, the stuff that is important to you and not the application itself. While this is a good philosophy, it’s easy to overdo something that is good. I’m still not convinced that it’s a good idea to remove the icons, we humans are visual beings and up until now it has been possible to use a computer in a foreign language just because you remember locations and icons, not so much going forward. Biggest change in this regard between the beta and the release candidate is the total removal of anything called icons in Windows Live Mail. Have a look at my before and after screenshots of the e-mail folders.
There is no denying that the new version is more slick
Windows Live Messenger
When the first beta of the new WLE arrived I quickly realized which direction Microsoft is going. My initial comment was that I didn’t think “Thanks for your patience” during the login process was any useful. I know that the application is not intelligent and I know that it’s not sincere when it thanks me and when it apologies to me when something goes wrong. My feedback from Microsoft on this was that this is the direction they are going, making the applications more “social” and friendly.
A quick digression from WLE, but still relevant: I have been thinking on something for a while, how we humans attribute non-human creatures and objects with human characteristics, like feelings and intent. Dog owners think their pets understand their feelings and we tend (particularly computer programmers) to establish a love and hate relationship with our computers, mobile phones and other devices. This is called Anthropomorphism. With this basis, I formed a new concept that I have called morphi. morphi is the concept of machines, computers and software that behaves as-if they possess human characteristics and I think it’s one of the next big evolutionary steps in software, and the stepping stone towards general artificial intelligence and humanoid robots. You can read more about morphi at http://morphi.me/.
So I am no longer against this personalization and humanization of computer software, in fact I endorse it and I hope more will follow. What we are seeing today is still just tiny baby steps towards software that will truly be able to work together with you, instead of being a completely inanimate piece of technology that only does your bidding.
Moving on to WLE again, the left screenshot shows the previous beta of Live Messenger and the right shows the newly refreshed Messenger. As you can see it’s a lot cleaner, less mess and noise. The focus is on what’s important: username, password, sign in status and the button. Everything else is hidden nicely away. And it even greets you a welcome back! “Did Messenger miss me? How did it know I was gone? Well, I’m happy that Messenger likes that I’m back. It’s time to have some fun!”
Next screenshot shows the main window with my contacts, favorites, groups and so forth. One thing they did to clean it up was to make the number of unread e-mails show 99+ if you go beyond that. Right now, I have 2664 unread e-mails on my primary Hotmail account, and in the old Messenger it did not look very nice. I really don’t care if I have 1500 unread or 2500 unread, this is (99+) probably not as useful as the full unread e-mail count, least not for me, but for others, maybe?
Chat windows have been freshened up a little bit (in the earlier beta and new release candidate). Two of the most welcome features for me is the ability to clean up the UI (hide both action toolbar and display pictures) and personalized background themes. I’m sure there are some of you that have not noticed yet, but depending on the theme you pick on your messenger (changed by clicking the top-right corner of main window) your friends will see YOUR theme when you are talking with them, and you’re seeing their theme. This puts a bit more personal feel to the chats.
Notification window now has rounded corners and background shadow.
It looks pretty slick :-)
Windows Live Mail
WLM is the most important piece in WLE. E-mail is very important to millions of people worldwide and most of us sends a bunch of e-mails every day. For many, Microsoft Office Outlook has been the primary e-mailing client. I use a combination of WLM, Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Google Apps (GMail) and Hotmail (web-client). My time within Outlook has been seriously reduced the last year, thanks not only to WLM, but Outlook has become a huge resource hog. I find myself launching a browser and using Outlook Web Access more than I start Outlook, yet there are many features missing from OWA.
Mail
View by Conversation is finally working on WLM and that’s probably the best new feature for me (maybe it’s always worked, but now the option is enabled in the menu, though it changes the layout. Why can’t we have the default layout with View by Conversation? Consider that a feature-request!). The only reason why I’m not complaining about the icon removal is that it’s now changed into a list box instead of a normal tree view. Or rather, it’s a tree control with selections taking full width. Somehow it works for me, though I still wish there was icons to quickly identify Inbox, Junk and so forth.
One interesting rename is Send/receive which is now named Sync. That’s a interesting change, considering that Send/receive is something that has been with us for a long while in e-mail applications, yet we live in a different world today. We used to have POP accounts and download our e-mails to the local computer, but today, most of us use IMAP or other protocols and store all our e-mails in the cloud.
Where did the Print button go? Sure you can modify the toolbar and add it, yet it’s removed by default. Maybe Microsoft is being proactive in the IT dream of an paperless office :-)
Context menus in WLM is a bit strange. They are all different depending on what you right click on in a received e-mail, and when you’re writing a new one, there are two different menus for the To and Subject fields. Strange if you ask me. Probably nobody other than me that cares about these things…
WLW does color schemes a whole lot better now. The color is gradient from the top and the bottom and the color picker is smooth. I hope they are giving the same treatment to Windows Live Writer as well, cause it’s color picker is ugly. Have a look at the differences and I hope they add Windows Color option everywhere, I want my apps to have same color theme as my desktop. Windows Live Photo Gallery still don’t have support for changing the color scheme, how come?
Calendar
Back in some of the earlier betas of WLE there was no Calendar option within WLM. I predicted that it would come soon, and surely it did (pretty obvious it had to happen). It’s a very simple and nice looking calendar – and very obvious that it lacks a whole deal of features. You can’t for instance subscribe to a new calendar using the rich calendar tool, instead you have to login to http://calendar.live.com/ and add new calendars from there. I think we can expect Microsoft to take this tool a few steps forward in later releases and I hope it gets some focus, cause it’s an important piece of functionality.
Agenda and To-do list are two other features that is available online, but not in the tool.
Feeds
Favorites and Feeds is something Microsoft should store online for us. I don’t understand why Internet Explorer still only stores bookmarks on the local machine. There is a Live service for storing favorites, it just needs to tie into the Feeds tab in WLM and the Favorites tab in IE.
http://favorites.live.com/
Feedback: Manage Your Feeds opens the new dialog window in the primary monitor if you have multiple-monitors connected to your computer. This is a small annoyance, but it should be fixed.
Contacts
Small upgrades since the beta, nothing interesting to write about. I have decided to start using my Windows Live Contacts register as my primary register for contacts. That means I have to do some work to clean up my list, as it contains 522 contacts today and I have even more inside Outlook.
How do you manage a contact list of that many people? You don’t. Instead, you delegate the problem of keeping up-to-date contact information to everybody you know. Windows Live Contacts allows you to automatically receive contact updates. Just click the button to request contact updates. You no longer need to use third party services or tools to get this functionality.
Feedback to Microsoft: Please make it possible to delete custom metadata. What this means, is that I want anything custom details I write on my contacts to be deleted when I’m receiving updated information. If I manually enter the address to a contact and they update their profile information – I won’t get that information. It should obviously be possible to decide if you want to keep your custom information or the update details. This way, you won’t loose anything and be more in control of the information.
I’m currently working on a small utility that will help me synchronize between Windows Live Contacts and Outlook (Exchange) contacts. More on this in a future blog post.
Newsgroups
It’s been a while since I was an active NNTP user, but WLM continue to have support for Newsgroups. It’s a protocol that is still being heavily used, but I wouldn’t be able to stick with WLM if I was a heavy newsgroup user. For that it needs a lot more features, like watching (tracking) a specific thread. Simple way to see all follow-up posts in threads I participate in, some statistics and intelligent agent that helps me use it and participate in a productive way on newsgroups.
Windows Live Photo Gallery
WLPG has become a very powerful photo management tool. It’s very enjoyable to use and now it even recognizes human faces in the photographs. You can tag your photos with contacts from your Windows Live Contacts. That’s a very handy feature.
I have one big feature request to Microsoft (already said this before) and that is: please add a “full size” mode to the the browse mode in WLPG. What I mean by that is the ability to display photos in a “full-size” mode without actually “opening” them by double-clicking. It doesn’t have to be absolutely original size of the photos, but it should be displayed as big as the window allows one individual photo to take up the full screen real-estate. That would make it much faster to scroll through photos in a folder.
Here is the photo from the time I meet Steve Ballmer together with other Norwegian .NET User Group leaders. As you can see, I don’t have SteveB in my Windows Live Contacts list yet so I was unable to tag him on my photo.
Microsoft continues to expand the options for editing a photo, I just wish they had added a live-preview feature to the editing options. When the user hovers the effects, it should automatically applied the effect to the photo – instead of forcing me to apply the effect and undoing if I did not like it.
Windows Live Writer
Not much to write home about on WLW. There are some small improvements all over but no radical differences from the previous beta. My biggest feature request for WLW in the future is an open XML format. The files that WLW makes today in the drafts folder is created using Structured Storage API. I want to read and edit the WLW files using my mobile phone and possibly write some desktop utilities that parse the files and automatically adds content/changes to my drafts. WLW support extensibility through add-ins, though I would much rather like to manipulate the files directly without relying on a COM interface.
Here is a thread I started on this topic: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/writergeneral/thread/442f0687-fa5f-42ad-8a21-6f0fa2374bfa/
Windows Movie Maker Beta
This is the only tool in the WLE that is still in beta and for good reason. It’s still (as I reported earlier) pretty much a shell of a whole new engine that Microsoft has made for Movie Maker. I’m expecting that we will see more features in this tool going forward and I won’t bother writing much about it at the current stage. If you are a happy user of Windows Movie Maker, you should continue to use that or get something better.
Conclusions
So there you have it, WLE is shaping up to become a very nice suite of tools and it’s been interesting following the evolution so far. If you have suggestions, complaints or problems with WLE, you should make sure to tell Microsoft about it. I promise you, they are really listening to their users and they are primarily building WLE for us. If we are happy, then Microsoft is happy. If you’re not happy, then tell Microsoft about it!
Until next time, be safe!