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Windows Live Wave 3 leaks

Sep. 17, 2008 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

Looks like the applications part of Windows Live Wave 3 has leaked. You can download it now from Microsoft. This beta release includes new versions of Windows Live Toolbar, Movie Maker, Family Safety, Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery, and Writer. And Rafael tells me there are references to Windows Live Sync and Office Live in the installer, so there’s more coming down the road!

Here’s what I know about this release, in a nutshell.

Windows Live Mail now includes Calendar integration. (Woot!)

Windows Live Movie Maker will replace Movie Maker in Windows but is now designed more for creating videos for YouTube and other services, since that’s what people are doing with movies these days. (Plus, most movies are created on cell phones and still cameras, not dedicated video cameras.

Windows Live Messenger looks awesome, despite reports about Microsoft backing away from a supposed WPF-based design.

Windows Live Photo Gallery now does facial recognition. Check out the new button-less toolbar, which is making its debut across several of these apps as well. Also, it looks like Flickr won’t be the only third party plugin for much longer.

Windows Live Writer is much advanced with better video embedding and a smarter UI.

More info soon! --Paul

Discuss this Article 25

dbf11
on Sep 17, 2008
Got it, installed it, can't find face recognition in WLPG. What am I missing?
james3mg
on Sep 17, 2008
I can't WAIT for face recognition in Photo Gallery- that'll save SO much time labeling pictures- all I should have to do is confirm! I like Picassa's way of doing it (though triggering the function should be easier), but it doesn't translate to Vista tags :(
cgdams
on Sep 17, 2008
@dbf11: Yep, me too. Photo Gallery works great, but i haven't found the recognition feature either....
xiphi
on Sep 17, 2008
If you click the picture, on the right you'll see "1 person found". Click it, and it will show you the facial area it found. Click the area and you can label it.
Nickelgreen
on Sep 17, 2008
Yesterday it was my 40th birthday. This beta is a nice present that I really appreciate. :-) (I'm surfing apps to figure out what's new)
james3mg
on Sep 17, 2008
Make sure you're using the Live Photo Gallery Beta, as it doesn't remove the bundled Photo Gallery. You should see "People Tags" just above "Descriptive Tags" on the left, under the date sort options. One big annoyance I noticed has been fixed- if you double-click a picture to go to the larger view of that picture, for some reason it's really easy to want to hit Close rather than the "Back to Gallery" button. Now, if you hit close accidentally, it takes you Back to the Gallery! Unfortunately, after only a few minutes of tinkering with it, I haven't found that it "learns" and guesses at who the faces might be...it just tells you it found a face and there's a link to identify it yourself. Hopefully that changes before the final release. Also, I wish you could drag a descriptive tag up to People tags, as I've already tagged most of my pictures with the people in it...
subzerohitman721
on Sep 17, 2008
Sounds cool to me. I'm looking foward to grabbing this when I get a video recorder, new digital camera, etc. All of which are becoming higher priority because I have two children and I'm always being asked for new pictures of my little ones.
shark47
on Sep 17, 2008
"Unfortunately, after only a few minutes of tinkering with it, I haven't found that it "learns" and guesses at who the faces might be...it just tells you it found a face and there's a link to identify it yourself. Hopefully that changes before the final release. " That doesn't seem to be all that useful. I don't need a piece of software to tell me that it found a face in the image.
bettieblu
on Sep 17, 2008
"Plus, most movies are created on cell phones and still cameras, not dedicated video cameras" Must be an age thing (I am 42 in October). I love my Sony hard drive camcorder and take a lot of video of my 3 kids. No way I would use a cell phone or a still camera unless that is all I had with me and REALLY want to capture some video. Then again for the 12-25 age group that have cells phone grafted to their bodies and they might use them all the time. In fact I am sure they do viewing those low quality videos on you tube. Does this new Movie Maker support formats other than tape based camcorders out of the box (or download:))??? Vista did not. Sadly I was running 64bit Vista on my HP notebook back in mid 2007 when I got my new Sony Hard Drive camcorder. Vista would not see the media, like it did with the tape based Sony camera. I had to download Sony software, and it only worked on 32bit Vista:( So I rebuilt and then I could not use all of my 4gigs of RAM, good stuff.
cgdams
on Sep 17, 2008
Seems i simply misunderstood the expression "face recognition". Obviously, it means that Live Photo Gallery can tell faces from non-faces on a picture and not recognise persons it has seen already on other pictures. To be fair, even that feature speeds up name tagging of pictures quite a bit. Nice...
dbf11
on Sep 17, 2008
James3mg was right. Despite the fact that I'm sure I've set Live Gallery as default previously, it was still loading good old WPG. Agree with cgadams - it looks like basic FACIAL recognition, rather than the IDENTITY / PERSON recognition featured in Picassa3. There's a number counting down at the bottom saying "### updates remaining", so it's possible that there is more advanced recognition going on, but I doubt it.
shark47
on Sep 17, 2008
http://liveside.net/main/archive/2008/09/18/wave-3-windows-live-photo-ga... "And this is where the question comes in – where did facial recognition go? We hope that it will eventually make a comeback in the next beta version... " So - no facial recognition in this beta. Windows Live Movie Maker is also disappointing according to the review at liveside. Of course, it might not be feature complete. Paul, I'm surprised you didn't have screenshots of Picasa up on your site.
mikegalos@msn.com
on Sep 17, 2008
Long Zheng over at IStartedSomething.com http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080917/windows-scenic-new-ribbon-base... is saying that the UI seen in these Wave 3 apps and in the screen shot of paint in Windows 7 is not the Fluent interface but a new similar interface named Windows Scenic.
arosania
on Sep 17, 2008
So far, so good. At first I couldn't install it 'cause I'm running server 2008 and the installer checks for the OS on launch... "only Vista and XP are supported" (compatibility mode didn't do the trick either), but after a bit of tweaking I managed to get it installed. Let's put it to the test...
mikegalos@msn.com
on Sep 17, 2008
For those of you preferring to do things more officially, the Inside Windows Live Messenger blog has the information and link for the official beta of Messenger (story at http://messengersays.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5B410F7FD930829E!47506.entry) Windows Live Wire (http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!6861.entry) has the news on downloading the betas of the whole suite. So, now it IS official.
DRWAM
on Sep 17, 2008
Happy Birthday Nickelgreen. Is the Live Calender available on the web, like the Google calender. Mike as I thanked you before, the Google sync app worked great with Outlook, so I was wondering if the Live calender does a similar web sync.
Ymaster587
on Sep 17, 2008
Sigh I was hoping for a more feature complete version of Movie Maker instead of a stripped down one. At least the other apps are upgrades.
shark47
on Sep 17, 2008
"Is the Live Calender available on the web, like the Google calender. Mike as I thanked you before, the Google sync app worked great with Outlook, so I was wondering if the Live calender does a similar web sync." Yes to both. Live Calendar is accessed from your Hotmail account. Also, I think the new Outlook Connector syncs the calendar too. You can also use Windows Live Mail on the desktop instead of Outlook, if you want.
mikegalos@msn.com
on Sep 17, 2008
DRWAM I haven't done enough testing to really know (I set it up with a test account but haven't really exercised the program yet)
DRWAM
on Sep 17, 2008
Thanks sharkster, I'll buy you a cheese steak.
DRWAM
on Sep 17, 2008
The Google calendar is also in beta, but has a 2 way sync app with Outlook, which can be automatically set to sync at any time interval [every 15 minutes for example]. Hopefully, this will occur with Live as well. Currently, it seems that we can only export a calender, then import to Live, rather than sync. But this is still beta. It seems a little more responsive than Google as well. I like it. Google has a list mode for the calendar on the iPhone, but I can't get anything Live with iPhone yet [beta]. A $10 iPhone app called SaiSuke calender, syncs with Google and gives a few more functions than the Google site using iPhone. Perhaps they will support Windows Live soon, or Windows Live will support iPhone soon.
WazNeeni
on Sep 17, 2008
Never got a prompt to install Movie Maker. Though, Calendar integration is really what I've been waiting for.
WazNeeni
on Sep 17, 2008
Found it. http://download.live.com/moviemaker It's just not included in the Live Installer package.
WazNeeni
on Sep 17, 2008
C'mon, Paul...no message edit feature? Anyway, I was wrong. It's a XP/Vista thing. "For Movie Maker only: Movie Maker does not support Windows XP, and requires ATI Radeon 9500 (or higher) or nVidia GeForce FX 5900 (or higher)."
shark47
on Sep 18, 2008
Doc, Does the cheese steak come with a return receipt? Just kidding!

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