Comments

1. dovella

   
   Posted on: December 15, 2008 at 6:09PM  

   COOL ;)
2. chakkaradeep

   
   Posted on: December 15, 2008 at 6:20PM  

   Great news!
3. Islander

   
   Posted on: December 15, 2008 at 6:41PM  

   Really amazing, but.... please please please change the functionality of dragging a photo into a WLM chat window back to how it was before, or at least make an option to enable the old behaving. It's just so freaking annoying when you want to send someone a photo or two and have to go through the menu for that.
4. Alemaker

   
   Posted on: December 15, 2008 at 6:53PM  

   Just wondering where my Signature Sound went?? Loved that feature. :-(  Also,thanks for fixing custom smileys to show up when you type them,that was rally annoying in older builds.
5. freitasm

   

   
   Posted on: December 15, 2008 at 9:16PM  

   Nice... But why is this not available though Windows Update?
6. yert

   
   Posted on: December 15, 2008 at 11:09PM  

   @freitasm: It still has a beta tag. If you have Silverlight and other such apps installed, they do update through Windows Update when a full version is available iirc.
7. Daniel

   
   Posted on: December 16, 2008 at 1:06AM  

   Looking good. Like the refresh look to it.
8. anonymuos

   
   Posted on: December 16, 2008 at 3:30AM  

   I fail to understand why Microsoft has developed the habit of constantly and drastically changing user interfaces of desktop applications and calling the new UI revolutionary. Office 2007, Windows Live, Vista they're all the same and that is the reason they're not being received as well as previous products. Users do not like it when the UI changes and they've to adjust and relearn stuff, users hate it when it when their favorite feature is removed from the UI. Why can't you add features non-destructively? I don't want applications with flashy icons and eye candy UI, I want full-featured applications whose UI doesn't change every time I upgrade to a slightly new version. I will not enumerate what all has been removed, that is Microsoft's job, not mine.

   My minimum baseline botttomline expection from Windows Live was that it will offer at least equivalent functionality as the programs it is replacing. But lots of features seem to be pulled from Windows Live Mail (which replaces Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, same goes for Photo Gallery). Microsoft's Live Movie Maker historically is and will always remain a joke, an abomination. It falls further down and sets a new low by dropping features of the existing Windows Movie Maker. This time, MS went so far as to make Live Messenger and Live Writer drop features!! Using false marketing PR language like "high quality", "commitment" and "great experience", MS seems to have forgotten the fundamentals of desktop computing which once it was good at.

   I guess the time has come when the Windows desktop monopoly slowly falls, not overnight but slowly and steadily) and we'll see true competition in the form of Mac OS X and Linux (though Linux makers also do not "get it").
9. Brandon LeBlanc

   

   
   Posted on: December 16, 2008 at 3:51AM  

   anonymuos, could you possibly give examples of what features were supposedly "pulled" from Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Photo Gallery from their predecessors? I'm curious. I find Windows Live Photo Gallery does everything Windows Vista's Windows Photo Gallery did - plus a whole lot more. And Windows Live Mail is certainly a vast improvement over Windows Mail with better newsgroup support, the addition of RSS, the ability to sync Hotmail, better IMAP support, and now full-on calendar sync with Windows Live Calendar.

   Also: what features were dropped from Messenger and Writer?

   I'd love to dig in to what you think was dropped and maybe offer up some answers for you.

   Thanks,

   Brandon
10. anonymuos

    
    Posted on: December 16, 2008 at 4:43AM  

    The setup is very evil. To begin with, I cannot download the full installer for an app directly. The slow runs slow and bloated, caches all files without choice in %CommonProgramFiles%\Windows Live including MSIs as well as the original 130+ MB setup file making it a total of 260+ MB. While uninstalling it does not uninstall Live Sync, ChoiceGuard and the Upload tool. It creates a useless redundant icon for Windows Live Call which does the same thing as launching Live Messenger. When the separate components (Live Sync, Upload tool) are removed from Add/Remove programs, they MSIs still remain cached on the computer, they should get cleaned up. Also, why is Live Sync a dependency for any of the apps, I should be able to install the apps without Live Sync.

    All the programs have their icons removed which in spite of giving strong feedback has been ignored. Live Mail does not incorporate everything that Windows Calendar did. I cannot launch Contacts as a standalone app. Overall, the apps are better but I am exhausted catching up with UI changes every now and then. Where is the API documentation for Live Mail like Windows Mail has? Where have all the icons on the toolbar gone? Why isn't there a Movie Maker for XP? Why isn't there feature parity between XP and Vista versions? I don't have time to elaborately describe features dropped from Messenger, the Messenger team should see to that but I find several features missing.