For those that don't know MS makes a suite of free software it calls Windows Live Essentials it consists of Live Mail, Live photo gallery, Movie Maker, Windows Messenger, Live Writer (for making blogs), Family safety, Live Sync, and Bing toolbar.

Well the new beta is out for the next version of Live Essentials and it's pretty darn good! MS is saying that the new Live Photo gallery is better than Apple's iPhoto and they may be right! In the new version they add Facial Recognition so can tag a person in a photo and then Live photo which scan your other photos to see if that person is in any of those photos and then let tag that person in those photo's as well. iPhoto does this as well but has a neat feature that I had used years ago back in 2006 as an MS Research tool called photomerge that allow you to take the best parts of multiple pictures and make one good photo. I won't bother explaining just watch this video, it's really neat!

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Photo gallery now does batch processing,retouch, noise reduction and does panoramic photo stitching. Panoramic stitching isn't new to this version of photo gallery though, it also supports uploading to facebook, flickr, youtube, skydrive, etc.

The new version of Window Live Mail now incorporates the Ribbon UI which is in Office and the newest version of Outlook 2010. I love the new version of Outlook so I expect this version of Live Mail to be just as good except that it doesn't have all of the high end features of Outlook and doesn't support exchange.

Also Live Writer is known from what I hear from multiple sources as the best blogging program out there and it works with the popular sites. My friend writes a blog on blogspot and I turned her on to it and she loves it. She even made a blog post about how much she likes it and she's used it everytime from then on out. The new version adds the ribbon UI it to it and a few new features so if' you're into blogs then you'll love this program!

Live Sync seems to have consumed Live Mesh which i was a fan of and now it has it's features and more. This allows you to share files between Mac and PC much like dropbox and it also allows you to remotely connect to a PC to control it and gives you 2Gb of in the cloud storage.

There a bunch of new features like tabbed IM with Live messenger but I don't really care about that stuff, sorry! Anyways I recommend you guys try it out.

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta

 

Want Hotmail Active Sync!!

 

I guess I'll move my question here since this popped up.

Can windows live mail sync with my google calendar? Also, is windows live mail constantly checking to see if I have new mail? Only when its open, or is it possible to have it run in the background and check every number of minutes?

 

Live mail doesn't run in the background unless it's opened. you can set it to open when you turn on your PC and keep the program minimized. It checks for email every 30 min I believe but you can change that.

I don't think it works with Google calendar but it does work with gmail.

 

The final Live Essentials 2011 was released on Thursday. This will basically update the email, photo, chat, video editing programs that came with your Windows 7 PC if you got one.

http://explore.live.com/windows-live...tials?os=other

 

I could've sworn there was a thread like this before, because I commented on how I use Live Writer for blogging on SharePoint, Windows Live, and a couple Community Server sites. It's pretty well-written and the compatibility with so many blog sites is just how it should be.