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Windows Live Essentials 2009 Review
Windows Live Movie Maker BetaRating: n/a As the sole Essentials application that is not available in final form at this time, Windows Live Movie Maker will be improved over the next several months, I'm told, and completed later this year. As with previous versions, Windows Live Movie Maker is a video editing application. But this time around, the focus has changed somewhat: Now, the application is very much geared towards users who want to share their home movies via online services like YouTube and MSN Soapbox. I think that makes a lot of sense. But in making this transition, Movie Maker is both simpler and less sophisticated. And that may be less appealing to some Movie Maker fans. (And I'm assuming there are at least a few out there.) I don't want to rip Windows Live Movie Maker too harshly yet, as it's unfinished and will no doubt improve in the months ahead. But in its current form, what we see is a movie editor that offers no Timeline mode at all. The publishing and output options are, charitably, sparse. The video import format support is likewise limited. Captions, such as they are, are created via a misnamed Edit tab. It's kind of a mess. All that said, Windows Live Movie Maker does hit all the high points, and to be fair, most people aren't interested in high-end (read: complicated) video editing features anyway. If you're among that majority of people who simply create short home videos on a still camera (or cell phone) and are looking for a way to get that video into presentable quality as quickly and easily as possible so you can then post it online, well, you know, Windows Live Movie Maker might just be the ticket. Let's give it a few more months. You never know.
Windows Live Photo GalleryRating: Windows Live Photo Gallery is the best version yet of Microsoft's superb photo editing and management solution, and while it lacks some high-end features, I feel that it strikes the right balance for most consumers. In fact, unless you have very specific needs, Windows Live Photo Gallery may be the only photo editor you'll ever need. It hits all the basics, of course. You can view photos by folder, by date taken, by tag (meta data), or, beginning in this version, by people, using a new People tags feature that's discussed below. You can configure the size of thumbnails, rotate photos in either direction, trigger slideshows, and email, print, and publish photos to a variety of services. You can send your photos off to blogs, data CDs, DVDs, and, via Windows Live Movie Maker, video projects.
The editing functionality is first class as well, though this latest version has a curious habit of straightening every single photo you alter with "Auto adjust," a change that is rarely required. You can adjust exposure and color, straighten and crop photos, adjust detail, fix red eye, and apply various black and white effects. Via a secretive right-click menu, you can also resize photos, though this option is curiously available only in Gallery view and not in Fix view. It all works exactly the way it should for the most part.
There are some interesting new features, however, and these put Windows Live Photo Gallery over the top. A new People tags feature lets you tag individuals in photos and assign names to them. (No, Apple didn't invent this feature.) When you do this (via the Info menu), Windows Live Photo Gallery brings up a list of your contacts, so you can assign accordingly. If the person isn't in your contacts list, you can simply manually assign a name. These tags stay with the photos and will travel to compatible online services, like Windows Live Photos. And inside of Gallery, you can view your photos by person, if you'd like. So if you've tagged enough of your photos in this way, you'll have a new way of browsing your collection.
A panoramic stitch feature lets you CTRL-click two or more contiguous photos and then digitally stitch them together into a single panoramic view. This feature works surprisingly well, as evidenced by this shot of Dunluce Castle in Northern Ireland, which was stitched together from 6 separate photos.
Curiously, Windows Live Photo Gallery is missing some obvious functionality. The most glaring: There is no way to sync a photo library, automatically, to Microsoft's Windows Live Photos service, which is inexcusable. In fact, there's no easy way to bulk upload to Windows Live Photos at all right now, which is a huge problem, though one that is beyond the scope of this review, I guess. What you can do, in Windows Live Photo Gallery, is manually upload a collection of photos to an online album via the Publish toolbar button. But there are three confusingly similar upload choices--Online album, Group album, and Event album--that you'll need to sort out first. They don't make it easy. Windows Live ToolbarRating: I've never been a big fan of browser toolbars, but I have to admit, the new version of the Windows Live Toolbar has really caught me by surprise. These toolbars have always been about integrating with the online services provided by the toolbar maker (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and so on) and for a while they were heavy on features--like search boxes and pop-up blockers--that were later added directly to the browser. But with browsers now doing more and more, browser toolbars have been largely uninteresting for a while. Microsoft, it seems, has found a way to make them interesting again.
The key, as you might expect, is to focus on that integration bit. Yes, there's another (unnecessary) search box, and yes there are a series of buttons you can modify and layout across the toolbar. But some of these buttons work in unexpected and attractive ways. Consider the main set of buttons, which consist of seven textual choices: What's New, Profile, Mail, Photos, Calendar, MSN, and Share. The What's New option simply loads your new Windows Live Home portal, so no surprise there. Likewise, Profile loads your Windows Live Profile. But the remaining buttons don't trigger a browser redirection when clicked. Instead, they open cool-looking pop-windows that are tied to the button. Like so:
If you're familiar with the new Favorites Bar and Web Slices features in Internet Explorer 8, you'll probably notice a stylistic similarity here, and while that's true enough, I think the Windows Live Toolbar pop-ups are even better looking. But they work the same way: Instead of loading a new page, you can simply get an at-a-glance look at information that is probably pretty important to you; especially Mail and Calendar. And if you do want to dive deeper, all the items you see are interactive: Just click on an item to navigate to the appropriate page. (For example, if you click on an email message, that message loads in Hotmail.) So... If you're a Windows Live guy--and I suspect the excellence of these applications and the new Wave 3 services will expand that audience quite a bit--you will actually want to give the Windows Live Toolbar a shot. And that's something I've never been able to say about any browser toolbar with a straight face. If you're not, well, then you're not in the market for this toolbar anyway. Two quick (if obvious) issues with the toolbar: First, it expands the height of the browser toolbar area pretty dramatically, so if you are leaving the new Favorites Bar open in IE 8, especially, this might be a bit of overkill. Also, it's worth at least noting that the Windows Live Toolbar works only in IE. It'd be nice to see a Firefox version. I understand why there isn't. I'm just saying. Windows Live WriterRating: You either maintain a blog (or personal Web site) or you don't. If you don't, please feel free to move on. If you do, well. Then you need to check out Windows Live Writer immediately. This is the single nicest blog editor I've ever seen ... and it works with just about every single blogging service there is, and not just Microsoft's Spaces service. If you do use Spaces, all the better: Setup is simple, and you'll be up and running in no time. But I happen to use Community Server, and Blogger, and Windows Live Writer works just as well with both. It is one of those magical applications. You know, assuming you do need it. Windows Live Writer does so much, it's hard to even know where to start. The photo presentation capabilities have been dramatically improved with support for cropping, tilting, and nice-looking borders. You can also present a collection of photos in a new "scatter" style that resembles a pile of photos thrown onto a desk. It's much easier to add video to your posts as well, especially if that video is on a tier-one video sharing site (read: YouTube). Or on MSN Soapbox.
There are numerous other small improvements, including a nice bit of extensibility that provides additional functionality for those who need it: Right now, there are plug-ins for services like Digg, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. That just makes this program even more valuable. I do have one major problem with Windows Live Writer: Where you used to be able to easily add Web- and PC-based photos to a blog post, now you can only add photos from your PC. What's happened is that the Open File dialog no longer has the Web tab. So to add a Web-based picture to a post, you have to manually edit the HTML of the post, a capability that may be beyond the skills of many bloggers. This functionality was in previous beta versions of the software, so I suspect it's a bug. (Or maybe it's just an issue with Windows 7? I will investigate.) Other utilitiesAs noted previously, Windows Live Essentials comes with a number of other applications and utilities, which may or may not be useful, depending on your needs. Windows Live Family Safety is an odd one, given that both Windows Vista and 7 come with built-in parental controls. It's a bit top-heavy in the sense that every child you wish to protect must have a Windows Live ID registered with Microsoft, a somewhat daunting and time-consuming process. I'd like to see the overlap between this and the parental controls feature in Windows worked out. Or at least explained. For now, I'm just not interested. The Windows Live Sync service is something I actually use quite a bit, but it's in a weird state of flux right now, so bear with the side-story for a moment. Right now, Microsoft offers two cloud-based PC to PC data syncing services, Live Sync (formerly FolderShare) and Live Mesh. Both offer peer-to-peer (P2P) data sync, and work similarly. Live Mesh actually takes things quite a bit further by adding a Web-based desktop (for accessing your files from any PC), an application run-time environment, and support for non-PC-type devices, such as mobile phones. As such, Live Mesh is the platform of the future, and Microsoft tells me that a future version of Windows Live Sync--which is really just for PC-to-PC file sync, will, in fact, run on that platform. So... For now, Live Sync is really there as a support service for Windows Live Photo Gallery. It can be used to automatically sync your entire photo library from PC to PC. And that's a great idea, since photos are one of those things most people should be backing up (well, replicating) anyway. Office Outlook Connector is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 that allows you to access any number of Windows Live Hotmail-based email accounts (including hotmail.com, live.com, and msn.com) in a manner that is somewhat similar to corporate-oriented Exchange accounts. This access is not limited to email, either: Contacts (from Windows Live Contacts) and Calendar (from Windows Live Calendar) are also synced. It works well in my experience. Microsoft also includes its Office Live Add-In in Windows Live Essentials now; it will only appear if you have Microsoft Office installed on your system as well. This add-in makes it easier to work with Office Live Workspace, Microsoft's online document collaboration service. Microsoft's Silverlight technology is a way of moving the .NET programming paradigm to the Web, though most instances of it at this time are video-related. Put simply, it's Microsoft's version of Flash. It's good to have, I guess, as there is an ever-expanding collection of Web sites using the technology, but it's not critical to Essentials in any way. Final thoughtsWindows Live Essentials is an excellent collection of utilities for virtually any user. That it runs on all modern version of Windows--XP, Vista, and 7--and is completely free really seals the deal. While it's unlikely that most people would be interested in all of the applications in the suite, it's equally unlikely that there isn't at least one application in there that you'll use all the time. In fact, I bet there's more than one. As I noted earlier, Windows Live Essentials is one of the first things I install after installing Windows, and it's an important part of my daily routine. I recommend it highly. --Paul Thurrott
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My rating
Related reading: Windows Live Wave 3MSN 14: Microsoft's New Portal
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