Windows Live and the Future

Windows Live represents a huge leap forward for Windows and software integration. Currently, Windows Live Mail is integrated with calendar. Photo Gallery recognizes people from your contacts(with some training). Those same contacts are kept in the online services as well as in Windows Messenger and Windows Live Call. All of the services integrate well with Flickr, and can be extended to add Picasa support. SkyDrive, with a bit more storage, could be the online equivalent of a flash drive. Live Mesh is the new remote assistance service, allowing tech support to be handled largely remotely. The potential for these services integrating closely with Windows 7 is huge. While Windows 7 will not come with these apps, Microsoft could just provide an easy link to install them. While I don’t know much about the new Windows 7 UI(current builds just use the Vista UI), if something like a Windows Live sidebar gadget were to emerge in Windows 7, it would make the Live services amazing. Somehow I don’t think that Apple’s ads will be too successful when Microsoft can counter iLife with Live.

Windows Live Movie Maker Beta

This is Windows Movie Maker. Despite some slight changes, the interface hasn’t changed all that much since the days of Windows XP SP1. This review, however, is not about Windows Movie Maker. It is about Windows Live Movie Maker Beta, which shipped with the third wave of windows live betas.

Windows Live Movie Maker has inherited the Ribbon from Microsoft Office 2007. There is a lot of room free on the ribbon, so I expect that lots of features will be added there. For now its basic, but a lot easier to use than the non-live version. It also makes it very easy to publish videos to the web. It comes with a soapbox plugin, but you can get plugins for SmugMug and Flickr. This features is really a bit hindered by the lack of a youtube function, but hopefully this will come in time.

The other tab on the ribbon:

Expanding the Effects and Transitions boxes reveals that there are only three effects and two transitions, but more will probably be added later into the beta, and certainly by the time it leaves beta.

Its also inherited the file menu from Office 2007. Until there are more complete features, there's not much to review, but it certainly looks promising.