The Windows Live Messenger Team is committed to delivering a safe and secure instant messaging experience to its users. In order to do this, they are asking anyone who is still on Windows Live Messenger versions 8.1, 8.5 and 14.0 to upgrade to the newest version of Windows Live Messenger. This can be done today via download.live.com.

Over the course of the next few months, there will be a phased approach to get everyone updated to the latest Windows Live Messenger release.

For more information, see this blog post from the Windows Live Messenger Team.

Today, we are announcing that we are extending the Browser for the Better Campaign with Internet Explorer 8. We will continue to help fight hunger by donating 8 meals for every download of Internet Explorer 8 throughout the month of September. September is Hunger Action Month.

We want to encourage our customers to upgrade to a modern and secure browser – so we are doubling donations for people who switch from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8 through this campaign. If you move from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8, we will donate 16 meals to help fight hunger!

For more information, see this press release from Feeding America.

Dell is jumping in to help business (commercial) customers get ready for Windows 7 by offering Windows 7 drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs. They are posting their Windows 7 drivers here (see Drivers and Downloads on left-hand navigation).

By offering drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs, Dell is helping business customers with Dell PCs in their environments prepare for Windows 7 deployments.

For more information, see this blog post on Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT Blog.

With yesterday’s update to Windows Live Essentials (which included the final release of Windows Live Movie Maker), we also released an updated version of Windows Live Family Safety.

Windows Live Family Safety is designed to help parents keep their children safer online. It offers parents the ability to manage which websites their kids can visit, as well as the list of contacts they can communicate with when using the Windows Live services such as Windows Live Spaces, Hotmail and Messenger. It can also generate a report for parents so that they can monitor their children’s computer and online activity. The best part is it lets parents monitor what their kids are doing from anywhere they are online — from any Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC that has web access and that parents have administrative rights to (via http://fss.live.com).

The updated version of Windows Live Family Safety also offers deeper integration with Windows resulting in fewer log-in prompts and faster web surfing compared to previous versions of Family Safety while it’s running on the PC.

Windows Live Family Safety uses Windows accounts as the basis for storing settings. Parents are no longer required to have a Windows Live ID for each child who needs their own settings.

Windows Live Family Safety reads the Windows Parental Control (WPC) settings on Windows Vista and Windows 7 enabling parents to retrieve WPC activity reports from any Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer online. These reports include time spent on the computer, browsing history, and games and applications run. This monitoring is transparent to the end user, as a notification is displayed once on Windows account login when monitoring is enabled.

With Windows 7, there are new Windows APIs which provide software developers greater control of Windows Parental Controls UI and settings. Windows Live Family Safety takes advantage of the new Windows APIs. It’s now easier for users to access Windows Live Family Safety directly from the Windows Parental Controls Control Panel in Windows 7.Windows Live Family Safety is another good example of Windows Live “lighting up” the Windows PC.

With these improvements to Windows Live Family Safety, Microsoft demonstrates its continued commitment to helping parents keep their kids safe on the Web. You can download Windows Live Family Safety, part of Windows Live Essentials, at download.live.com.

A few days ago you may have heard about a new webcam from Microsoft Hardware that does 720p High Definition widescreen video. Well… meet the new LifeCam Cinema!

The LifeCam Cinema records video at 720p HD in 16:9 widescreen up to 30 frames per second (fps). It uses ClearFrame Technology for smooth, detailed video and has an improved de-noiser. The improved de-noiser reduces image graininess - especially in low light. It also has a faster image-processing technology that keeps video smooth at any resolution. The LifeCam Cinema also has a high-precision glass element lens for much clearer video quality. You know how some webcams have blurry corners in videos? Yeah – not here! Other features include taking 5.0 megapixel stills, a digital noise-canceling microphone, and a flexible attachment base bends to fit on most surfaces (like the top of LCD monitors and notebook screens, or simply on your desk desk).

Through the LifeCam 3.0 software (which can be downloaded here), LifeCam Cinema users will enjoy integration with both Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker which was released yesterday. To record video and take still photos with the LifeCam Cinema, you will need the LifeCam software installed. After recording a video, you can quickly launch Windows Live Movie Maker to edit that video and share with friends and family online. Using Windows Live Movie Maker, you can add transitions and other animations to videos recorded with the LifeCam Cinema as well as music, captions and more. When taking still photos, you can view those photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery and edit and add tags.

The LifeCam Cinema will be available starting in September 2009 for an estimated retail price of $79.95 (U.S.).

For more information on the LifeCam Cinema, click here for the press release.

I am currently giving the LifeCam Cinema a spin myself – courtesy of Microsoft Hardware. Expect to see some movies created with the LifeCam Cinema and edited with Windows Live Movie Maker in the very near future.

Back in June, I blogged the first of 6 blog posts dedicated to tips and/or tricks for Windows Media Player in Windows 7. I had originally intended to post the remaining 5 blog posts over the course of 3 weeks. However, that didn’t quite happen. I intend to post the remaining posts, starting today with the 2^nd blog post, but won’t commit to any specific timeline.

Windows 7 introduces Jump Lists as one of the many enhancements to the Windows Taskbar. And Windows Media Player takes advantage of this feature for quick access to your digital media.

Here are a few tips for working with the Jump List for Windows Media Player:

• You can drag most items off of the Windows Media Player Jump List and onto the desktop to create a shortcut that can be used on any computer to do that query and return local items.
• Doing a search on a view and double clicking one of the result items will log the search query to the Jump List. For example, can go to all songs and search for ‘NOT genre:Christmas’ and you’ll get a Jump List item of all your music with no Christmas music (see above screenshot).
• You can pin any file Windows Media Player will play in the Jump List by directly dragging and dropping the file onto the Windows Media Player icon on the Windows Taskbar.
• Clicking “Play All” or playing a stack view from File Explorer will log to the Jump List.
• If you go to Organize, then Options, and then Player - the last option in Player settings “Save recently used to the Jump List instead of frequently used” toggles what shows on your Jump List.

Hope you enjoyed these Jump List tips for Windows Media Player!

RELATED:
Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows Media Player in Windows 7

Brian Hall, General Manager for Windows Live, just has announced via the Windows Live Team Blog that the new Windows Live Movie Maker is now available. The new version of Windows Live Movie Maker is part of an update to Windows Live Essentials – available for download here. I’m currently running the new version of Windows Live Movie Maker on Windows 7 RTM and it will also run on Windows Vista too.

For more information on the new Windows Live Movie Maker, see Brian’s blog post or this awesome resource website which includes demo, HD samples and deep product info.

Sorry for such a short post, but I’m off to make me some movies!

Today, socially engineered malware threats are on the rise and are heavily impacting the way people use the Internet - making it a consumer and industry issue.

A new study released today from NSS Labs shows that Internet Explorer 8 is the #1 browser in malware protection and also the #1 browser in phishing protection. The independent test results showed that Internet Explorer 8 blocks 3 times more malware threats than Firefox 3 and 10 times more malware threats than Google Chrome 2.

Given how Internet Explorer 8 performs against these socially engineered malware and phishing threats and the ongoing threat that cybercriminals pose against Internet users today, this is another good reason for consumers to upgrade to a modern browser and move on from earlier versions like Internet Explorer 6 where security issues were not then what they are today.

For more information on this new NSS Labs study and how Internet Explorer 8 continues to help keep people protected while browsing the web – see this blog post from the Internet Explorer Team on the IEBlog.

The Paint.NET Team has announced the v3.5 of Paint.NET will use DirectWrite on Windows 7 for rendering text. DirectWrite is part of Windows 7’s text rendering enhancements. Very cool!

DirectWrite is one of the new additions to the DirectX family of APIs in Windows 7. DirectWrite enables better readability, adds support for a large variety of languages and scripts, and in conjunction with Direct2D provides superior rendering performance for Windows applications. Applications can also use DirectWrite with GDI and carry forward existing investments in the Win32 code base. You can read more about DirectWrite here.

You can download an alpha build (build 3509) of Paint.NET v3.5 here. Please be warned that alpha builds are pre-beta quality and will likely have issues. But if you want to play around, give it a try.

This is the first of several upcoming blog posts on different aspects of Windows Live Essentials. For more information on the Windows 7 + Windows Live experience – click here.

First, I would like to congratulate the Windows Live Messenger Team for 10 years of Messenger! Find out how *you* can celebrate the 10 Year Anniversary of Windows Live Messenger by reading this blog post from the Messenger Team. I have the pleasure of being able to say I’ve been a Messenger user since V1. It’s been exciting to see the progression of Messenger over the last decade.

Today, I use Windows Live Messenger as a primary communication vehicle (outside of email) with friends and colleagues. As you can imagine, I have a pretty big contact list. Being able to manage and customize the layout of my contact list is pretty important.

By default, Messenger will show all contacts in your contact list online or offline, as well as groups. Messenger will also show the tab bar, favorites, and What’s New feed. To customize this default layout of your contact list, you can click the contact list layout button next to the add contact button in Messenger (see below screenshot).

The Options window will appear with the layout options for your contact list.

This is where you can customize the layout of your contacts list in Messenger to fit your needs.

For me, because I have so many contacts in my contacts list, I find that I am doing a lot of scrolling between the different categories. Looking at my own IM behavior, I’m usually chatting with contacts that are online. So to help alleviate some of the scrolling, I have unchecked “Show offline contacts”. This means that contacts that are offline will not appear in my contact list in Messenger until they come online.

You can view contacts on your contact list by different sizes in Messenger: Large, Medium, Small or Status only. To consume less space on my contacts list, I’ve chosen to view contacts by status only. What’s great here is you can choose the sizes of your contacts by your main contact list and favorite contacts just in case you want your favorite contacts viewed differently than the rest.

If you someone who’s not using Windows Live Groups, you can uncheck “Show groups” so this category doesn’t appear on your contact list. You can also do this for other parts of the window on this menu too.

Hopefully talking about this helps those of you with large contact lists like me manage and customize the layout for a better experience in Messenger!

One last thing – did you know that Windows Live uses a unified contacts “store”? That means the same contacts you have in Messenger are the same contacts you have in Hotmail or in Windows Live Mail on the PC. More on this and other aspects of Windows Live Essentials in upcoming blog posts!

I am posting this on behalf of Jason Grieves who is a Program Manager on the Windows Accessibility Team. He and his colleague Masahiko Kaneko co-authored a book about our engineering process for accessibility. This is a great example of us helping the ecosystem build great software.

Our expectations of software are very high (as they should be!). We expect that the software we use will be reliable, secure, and perform well - we expect the software to “just work.” There are many ways that we experience software, some of us use the traditional input method of keyboard and mouse. I and many other people augment this with accessible solutions such as larger screens, speech recognition, and screen readers.

In Windows we consider accessibility just like reliability, performance, and security to be fundamental to all software in the operating system. Our feature teams create their software to meet these and other core requirements, which combine to create an operating system that meets the essential expectations of our users. In Windows 7 we continued the integration of accessibility requirements into our software engineering process. Accessibility, like the other fundamental requirements, has been planned, designed, implemented and tested in Windows 7.

In an effort to enable software developers to create accessible Windows applications, we wanted to share our process with the community. We have captured this engineering process in a new book, Engineering Software for Accessibility. The book addresses three basic questions:

• How do you plan for accessibility?
• How do you design your software for accessibility?
• How can you implement and test to your software to confirm it meets the accessible design?

We encourage software developers and anyone with an interest in accessible software to get a copy of our book. You can download a free DOC version of the eBook (right-click to download), or order a paper copy from Amazon.

You will learn that properly implemented accessibility enables access to Windows applications for users with a variety of capabilities. We are pleased to offer you the ability to follow much of process our engineers used to make Windows 7 the most accessible operating system Microsoft has yet produced!

Engineering Software for Accessibility is the latest of several efforts to assist Developers and Testers create accessible solutions. Early in the Windows 7 development cycle we released two accessibility testing tools as open source on CodePlex. UI Accessibility Checker and UI Automation Verify are designed to check the accessibility of applications that implement programmatic access via the MSAA or UI Automation APIs.

We look forward to trying you accessible Windows software!

Microsoft Hardware announced earlier today the new Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000. Last week, I met with the awesome folks from Microsoft Hardware and they handed me a Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000 to use here in my office. Several of my latest blog posts (including this one) were written using the Comfort Desktop 5000.

A “desktop” is essentially a keyboard + mouse set. The Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000 comes with the Wireless Comfort Keyboard 5000 and the Wireless Mouse 5000.

The Wireless Comfort Keyboard 5000 is designed to encourage a natural wrist posture with a slight 6-degree curve. I spend a great deal of time typing on a PC so as you can imagine, having natural wrist posture is pretty important. It also features a soft-touch palm rest – with a textured design.

Like with previous keyboards from Microsoft Hardware, the Wireless Comfort Keyboard 5000 comes with removable feet. If you are someone that wants their keyboard tilted upward from the front, you can configure the feet for this. I personally like the keyboard tilted up from the back so this is the configuration I am running currently.

The Wireless Comfort Keyboard 5000 has low-profile quiet touch keys which make typing more comfortable.

It also features Media Keys for one-touch quick access to volume and playback controls.

The Wireless Mouse 5000 utilizes Microsoft’s BlueTrack Technology. That means this mouse can be used on more surfaces than any laser or optical mice could. The transceiver (2.4GHz wireless) for the desktop snaps into the bottom of the mouse. The design of the Wireless Mouse 5000 utilizes rubber on the sides for an easier grip. A 2 color battery life indicator will let you know when your batteries need replacing and the Wireless Mouse 5000 allows for one-touch access for Windows Flip.

The Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000 takes advantage of Windows 7 in several ways. It utilizes Taskbar Favorites, which I blogged about back in June. Taskbar Favorites maps the order of applications on the Windows Taskbar in Windows 7 to the “My Favorites” hot keys on a Microsoft Hardware keyboard. The “My Favorites” hot keys are the 5 numbered keys usually at the top of the keyboard. So for example if Internet Explorer 8 is the first pinned application on your Windows Taskbar in Windows 7, it gets mapped to the #1 My Favorites hot key on the Wireless Comfort Keyboard 5000.

To utilize Taskbar Favorites in Windows 7 today with your Microsoft Hardware keyboard, click here to download the latest version of IntelliType (version 7).

This fall, Microsoft Hardware will be supporting Device Stage in Windows 7 which will include the Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000.

NOTE: The above screenshot is not final and is used as an example for this blog post.

And the Wireless Mouse 5000 takes advantage of Windows 7’s enhanced Windows Flip capabilities with thumbnail previews of running applications.

The Microsoft Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000 will be available starting this month at an estimated retail price of $79.95 (U.S.).