Windows Live Essentials 2011

Source: Microsoft

Earlier this month Microsoft released in Beta form the new version of Windows Live Essentials, their suite of consumer-focussed multimedia and Internet applications designed to complement Windows 7. Most of the apps contained in the bundle were previously found in Windows XP and Vista, but these days Microsoft seems content to offer them as free standalone downloads, which makes sense I guess. The logic is that it means they can update them more frequently than the main OS, even if by "frequent" they really mean "every 18 months". Gotta love the Redmondian way of thinking sometimes!

The most interesting app update for me is the new version of Windows Live Messenger, which now links heavily into your Windows Live profile on the Web. The biggest new feature of Windows Live is the ability to link your profile to the various social networks people now belong to, such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr etc. This means that as soon as you log into Windows Live on the Web, or Messenger on the PC, your window fills up with all the content from these services that your Friends post. Which makes for a unique experience, and something that has long been missing on the PC. The ability to centralise all of this social information into one place is quite awesome, and from what Paul Thurrot has said over at the Supersite for Windows, this would appear to be very similar to how this kind of content will be handled on the forthcoming Windows Phone 7, which just sounds plain freakin' awesome.

Windows Live Mail has also received a nice update, bringing it just another step closer to looking and feeling like the younger brother to Outlook, the Titan of the corporate e-mail world. The use of the Ribbon interface in Live Mail, and indeed now all of the Windows Live Essentials apps, brings a nice uniformity to the suite, and certainly helps to make the entire set of applications feel more featured and robust, something you never quite seemed to feel with the 2009 version.

A lot of people compare Windows Live Essentials to Apple's iLife suite, which is a fair comparison to make I guess, with some similar apps found in both packages. But the key difference here is in price - WLE is free, while iLife isn't. And so while WLE is not as fully-featured as iLife (a common point of attack the iCabal make), of course one would expect iLife to be more endowed with features - given Apple expect you to pay for it!

Source: Microsoft

But while we're talking about comparable apps, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker both get big updates in this new package, with the former adding some very cool geotagging and face recognition features, and WLMM getting more effects and output modes. Sure, neither are going to give Photoshop or Premiere a run for their money, but if all you want to do is muck around with the photos and clips you took on your recent holiday, then these applications are more than capable of handling whatever requirements you have.

Another interesting element of WLE which makes it a boon for Windows Vista users is the Windows Live Sync tool, formally the Live Mesh application that Microsoft made available. This is some truly remarkable programming, whereby you can specify which folders on your computers to sync between the other computers you own. I find this incredibly useful, as it allows me to sync all my documents / music / pictures / videos between my main computer, and my travel netbook Eee PC. The end result of this is I always have access to my documents and files wherever I go, and I can edit and update them on either machine without needing to copy them back across. The syncing feature alone is worth its weight in gold, as well as the side effect that it allows you to decentralise your data onto multiple machines, meaning less chance of data loss should a single hard drive or computer ever go down. It is a shame the cloud-based storage for Live Sync is only 2gb, down from Live Meshs' 5gb. That was handy having on-line off-site backup, so hopefully this figure goes back up somewhat soon.

It's not all roses, however. This is definitely Beta software right now, so not really ideal for mainstream people. I have noticed some major memory leak issues on the Messenger and Mail applications, for example, and the programs do crash occasionally. So if you value 100% stability, stick with the 2009 releases for now. But if you want a sneak peak at where Windows 8 might be going in 2012, check out the new Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta. There's certainly enough in there to keep most people interested.