Just confirmed on The Windows Blog, the much anticipated Live Essentials 2011 beta (or wave 4) will be released to the public tomorrow. Just to re-iterate, XP users are out of luck, the new version will only be available for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users. Time to upgrade..

The Photo Fuse feature is definitely one to look out for, new to this version of Windows Live Photo Gallery it allows you to pick the best elements from multiple photos and create one perfect photo.

More @ The Windows Blog

From the screens above you can see the Windows Live Messenger iPhone app reflects the new Wave 4 UI available on http://home.live.com and will soon come to Windows Live Essentials desktop applications.

Functionality wise, the iPhone app allows you to see your social updates from your friends, from various different social networks all in a single stream. In-line commenting is supported. You can also upload photos directly from your iPhone to Windows Live, as well as accessing your hotmail email without exiting the app. The app also supports push notifications, so you can leave the app and still receive notifications when chat replies arrive.

View Full Album

Another important feature is the ability to sign into the iPhone app while still signed into your desktop messenger client. This is handy if your back and fwd to your desk a lot and handy inclusion.

The Photos section gives you access to your photos uploaded to http://photos.live.com and actually supports pinch and zoom gestures to resize the thumbnails, as well as a slideshow option.

Unfortunately Australian’s can’t currently download the app, hopefully this is fixed quickly, as Microsoft has spent a great deal of effort promoting just how many Australian’s use their services.

More @ iTunes Preview via My Microsoft Life

While today marks the consumer launch of Microsoft Office 2010 in Australia, I got a chance to take a look at the professional edition so here’s the review.

First of all lets cover what’s included, there is new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. It’s important to not the lack of InfoPath and remember Visio and Project are not included in the Office suite, but are still branded as Office products.

Chances are if your a business, it’s a good bet that your already running Microsoft Office, so the question really becomes should you upgrade. One of the most important influencers for the upgrade decision is the ‘what’s new’ list, so lets cover that now.

Backstage view – New to 2010 is the replacement for the file menu. The Backstage view gives you all the common tasks you would perform in one simply full screen view. Filling the application window, Backstage lets you create new documents based on new documents from templates, send or save your file or review your available print options. It actually works quite well, but will take some time for consumers to adjust.

The Ribbon – First introduced in some Office 2007 office apps, the successful ribbon is now refined and standard across all Office apps.

Jump Lists – All Office 2010 apps support Windows 7 Jump Lists, allowing convenient access to your recently used documents which can be pinned for easy access.

Templates – Basically every new version of office includes new themes, so this is nothing new, however there are some fairly good ones on offer, so don’t start from scratch, find a template and modify from there to save time.

Word 2010
Microsoft Word is arguably the most used application in the Office suite, so there should be key changes to improve productivity gains in Word 2010..  so is this the case ?

Text effects – this include the ability to add text effects directly to text, this previously required you to insert word art with some pretty average results.

Embedded search – Gone is the very dated popup search box, searching through a document now produces a search panel on the left, finding all references to your search term throughout the document, allowing you to easily skip between results.

Excel 2010

Sparklines – These are tiny charts that fit in the space of a single cell, this allows for a visual summary of trends alongside data.

64-bit – Excel is commonly used to store large amounts of data (sometimes this data really should be in a database). Excel 2010 can now take advantage of multithreading improvements to speed up the retrieving, sorting, and filtering data.

PowerPoint 2010

Transitions and animations – these have really taken a big step forward in this version. Now available is a long list of interesting, more professional transitions, as well as a slew of pre-built and custom animations for objects within your presentation.

Broadcast Slide Show – If you need to show off your presentation remotely, then the new Boadcast Slide Show feature will be an important feature for you and your business. Previously you may have had to resort to a 3rd party remote desktop solution at a decent cost to achieve this functionality. From the Slide Show tab, just hit Broadcast Slideshow, it’ll be uploaded (may require a LiveID), and then you receive a URL to send to remote viewers. Transitions sadly don’t make it over the wires, but animations are preserved.

Video – The fact is video and PowerPoint have never really worked well together, in this release that changes. Inserting a video is now a menial task which also comes along with effects and basic editing controls. It’s also easy to compress video to save on file size, so no need for standard users to learn about transcoding. If you find a video online you’d like to including in your presentation, Outlook 2010 makes it easy to paste in the embed code (note: some video effects won’t work on embedded video).

Mobile - One of the most unique features built into PowerPoint 2010 is the ability to use PowerPoint Mobile to control your presentation from your Windows Mobile phone. This feature does however require an add-in called Presentation Companion, this should be included out of the box. Hopefully this is also supported by Windows Phone 7 that ships later this year.

OneNote 2010
Taking notes is not just for students, professionals can also take advantage of taking notes, sketching ideas or flushing out concepts in OneNote 2010.

Linked Notes – If you’ve ever wanted to make notes about a document, but not actually include said notes within the document itself, then the new Linked Notes feature is for you. This would be great for making notes while proofreading, editing or reviewing a document. These are location aware, so when you make a note, it links to the location in the document you were in when creating it.

Outlook 2010

Social connector – This feature connects Outlook to your social and business networks, this allows easy access to more information about the person contacting you. See their recent activity on social networks, previous emails from the contact, attached files, IMs and connections. Currently the Outlook Social Connector only supports Linked In and MySpace but Facebook and Windows Live support is coming soon. Also it’s important to remember social connectors are only 32-bit, which means 64-bit users are out of luck.

Quick steps – These are designed to be a one click solution to common tasks in outlook such as marking an item as done, moving mail to a specific folder. Users can create custom Quick Steps to suit their workflow needs.

Publisher 2010

See through paper – Paper isn’t fully opaque, it’s slightly transparent, which means you’ll likely see some of the content on the page underneath when your document is printed. Publisher 2010 recognises this through a new backlight feature.

Access 2010

Expression Builder – This allows you to automate complicated database expressions easily, without writing code.

Application Parts – Databases can now be built in a modular fashion with pre-built Access components. These can be added to the database with a few simply clicks. New templates from Office.com also help get you up and running quickly.

Improved Forms and Reports – UI improvements are plentiful in Access 2010, particularly when it comes to forms and reports.

Price & Availability
Microsoft Office Professional 2010 costs A$849.00 if you buy through Microsoft’s online store. If you look around you can find it at places like CitySoftware for A$683.00. Another way to buy is to purchase a Product Key Card and download it yourself, using this method, it’ll set you back A$499.

Overall
If your still on 2003 it’s a no brainer, it’s time to upgrade. If your on Office 2007, then the ribbon standardisation is a much needed inclusion and backstage is nice addition, but its hard to point to many ‘must have’ new features for Office 2010.

While Microsoft will try and tell you Office 2010 is more collaborative than ever before, the reality is there’s a long way to go. Having multiple people work on a single document in reality is just 1 person working on a document and pushing changes to a central location (SkyDrive or SharePoint). There’s now live updating, nor is there chatting or conversation support while co-editing.

Update
It seems there is a way to chat to colleagues whilst editing.. it just requires Office Communicator 2007 R2.
 

More @ Microsoft Office

At Microsoft’s E3 2010 keynote this morning in the US, they announced a brand new model of the Xbox 360. The new hardware comes with a slick glossy black design, smaller in size and quiet. Hopefully the massive top and side grills provide adequate ventilation and mean the overheating / red ring of death problems are finally behind us. Microsoft say the new Xbox 360 is whisper quiet.. a stark contrast to the jet engine of Xbox 360 originals.

A much needed inclusion for the Xbox 360 hardware is built-in Wireless N.. finally !! A very, very welcome inclusion that had previously required a $150 adapter to achieve.

Launch console owners are all too familiar with the tiny 20GB HDD, the new model ships with a 250GB drive so there’s plenty of storage for game content, demos, movies, music etc. 250GB Xbox 360 hard drives have been a fairly unique item in Australia, for a long time only being available in a console bundle package.

Another advantage of the new model is it’s ability to power Kinect, where as current models will require a separate power brick when Kinect ships later this year.

The price of the new model is US$299 and if your in the US, it’s available today. Pricing and release dates for Australia are still to be announced.

Update
The new Xbox 360 will be available in Australia from July 1st 2010 and cost A$499, the current price of the Elite. [via Delimiter]

More @ Xbox

Well it’s official, the name Project Natal was just a code name, the retail name for Microsoft’s new control-less device is Kinect. While Kinect relates to the connected experiences it provides, I actually preferred Natal as the name. There’s been a lot of discussion about Natal since it’s unveiling at last years E3 and brand awareness was already high. With a renaming, that process needs to start again.

Update
Engadget have more info on Kinect and have confirmed video chat will be a key feature.

Kinect will launch a number of compatible titles while some previous titles may receive an update to make them Kinect compatible. Joystiq list the launch titles as:

• Kinectimals features over 20 different virtual pets, including lions, tigers, and cheetahs, to play with or raise.
• Joyride has returned to life as a controller-free racing game, apparently.
• Kinect Sports will offer sport games to play: "boxing, bowling, beach volleyball, track and field, soccer and table tennis." For each one, you will make motions to play the games.
• Kinect Adventures has a river raft and obstacle course to navigate — this is likely the demo we saw last week.
• MTV Games will release Dance Central, where you can cut a virtual rug.
• And there will be more games announced later featuring both Disney characters and Star Wars characters, in conjunction with Disney and LucasArts, respectively.

Gizmodo have an impressive gallery of hands-on photos from the E3 launch party. The final production model of Kinect actually looks a lot smaller than early Natal builds, but is a slick shade of glossy black. One possible issue I see with Kinect is its location in your home entertainment setup. Most decent setups have 5.1 surround sound, including a middle speaker placed below the TV, right where Kinect wants to be. It’s a lot larger than the Wii sensor bar, so sitting Kinect on top of your flat screen is not an option. Not sure what the right solution to this problem will be, hopefully Microsoft will tell us tomorrow morning.

GDGT users, be sure you add Kinect to your want list. Apparently 2 people already have it.

More @ Joystiq

Get ready gaming fans.. the insanity that is E3 is almost upon us. The worlds biggest gaming expo kicks off bright an early tomorrow morning with a keynote from Microsoft. They’re partnered with Fotel’s FOX8 channel to stream the keynote live for the first time. So if you have Foxtel, forget about the hassle of connecting your laptop to the big screen and head to FOX8 at 3:30am AEST tomorrow morning.

The event being titled Xbox 360: The Future Revealed will take a detailed look at Project Natal for the Xbox 360. There’s sure to be plenty of game demos, pricing and availability details. Reports in this morning from USA Today suggest Natal’s official release name will be Kinect.

This live broadcasting of technology events in Australia is a great thing, if only it was on free-to-air, then everyone could enjoy it.

More @ InsiderX via Kotaku

Those of you familiar with http://home.live.com will notice a change when you visit there today. Microsoft have updated the web properties of Live Wave 4.

Home page

This includes your Home screen which contains social updates from your contacts and their social network activities. A great feature of the update is the ability to leave comments directly from this page that will post back to Facebook and the like. To configure your site connections click on Add web activities in the top right. YouTube videos can be played in-line.

Web Messenger

The new web messenger is a big upgrade to the previous version. Instead of being relegated to a popout session, web messenger now integrated into your Windows Live experience. Those who work between multiple machines will appreciate that you can now be signed into web messenger in multiple places, including the desktop Live Messenger.

Office Web

This is a game changer. Office Web makes creating and editing Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote documents a great, free experience. This really does make Google docs look like a joke. I had previously used Google docs for podcast show notes, that ends today. Office web allows anyone with a LiveID to edit Office documents, so for a lot of people this will mean they won’t even need Office desktop applications. Obviously some more advanced functionality still requires apps, but the good news is opening a document in the Web App won’t strip anything out, so when you get back to the desktop, your document is preserved.

Office web is ideal if your on the road and come across a computer that doesn’t have Office installed. I can’t speak highly enough of what Microsoft has achieved here, a rich, free, multi-browser office suite in the cloud. Try it out for yourself at http://office.live.com/

Mobile / iPad
You should also be aware that the mobile experience has also been refined and works awesomely on the iPad. All items are presented in lovely finger-sized friendlyness. There are a couple of exceptions.. Hotmail seems to still be on the to-do-list and there’s no web messenger when using it on the iPad, on the flip side you do get a nice Windows Live icon for a web shortcut.

 
Windows Live on an iPad

More @ Liveside

After 18 months in beta Microsoft Tag is finally becoming a V1 product today. If you’ve never used the service before, then here’s the skinny. Microsoft created their own barcode (see below) that is specifically designed to work with cell phone cameras (even before they got decent). Anyone can create a Microsoft Tag, during the setup process, you setup what you’d like the tag to do when scanned. It can show contact details or launch a website etc.

Microsoft’s Tag comes with it’s own statistics, showing how many people action your Tag. Unlike traditional barcodes, the creator can at any time modify or update a tag. During the beta more than one billion tags have been created, clearly this has been a successful service, it’s not surprising Microsoft are going full version with it.

Update
Microsoft have now released an update to their Tag iPhone application. The update includes the new Microsoft Tag logo, as well as a better UI. The app is very quick to recognise a tag and also stores a history or previously scanned tags for future reference.

Microsoft say “Tags can help businesses engage customers at the point of maximum impact out in the real world, give developers with innovative ways to link the physical and digital worlds, and enable consumers to interact with others in new ways.”

The supported device list is massive, if you want to see if there’s a Tag app for your phone, check out the full list of supported devices.

More @ Microsoft Tag Blog

Either there’s a bug in the update or Microsoft are intentionally breaking leaked versions.

Today I was in Sydney for the official announcement of the upcoming version of Windows Live Hotmail. The new version is to be released ‘in the coming months’ and aims to reduce clutter, save time and share documents in the cloud.

The problem according to Microsoft is that “email hasn’t changed to cater for new and emerging trends in the last 14 years".

There’s also a new photo preview mode (above) so you don’t have to download large sized photos from friends, just select the one you want. There’s also a nice option to download all at once as a zip file.

Hotmail Highlights
This area shows not only email, but status updates from your friends on their social networks, appointments and birthday reminders.

Single Contact List
Your contact list will including people from your other social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace allowing you to view all your contacts in one place.

Conversation view
A feature borrowed from Office 2010 (or Google) is conversation view. This allows emails to be grouped together when it’s identified they belong to the same conversation. This saves space in your inbox, so you have one (expandable) entry, rather than dozens about the same thing. This is a strong part of the de-cluttering of the inbox initiative. Conversation view is opt-in, so those fans of old-school can be comfortable.

Sweep
A new sweep button allows for mass management of your email. Windows Live Mail will finally allow for outlook-type rules to move email to specific folders. A welcome inclusion.

Active views
A number of partner sites like Flickr, Linked In and YouTube, allow for content like photos and videos to be ‘live previewed’. This means you can view them directly in the email without having to launch a separate application or webpage. Internationally US residents will be able to use Active View with Hulu videos.

Exchange Push for Mobile
Something I’ve wanted Microsoft to do was something Google already offers and has done for months. Free exchange push email, contacts and calendar to mobile devices. The good news today is that Exchange Push from Microsoft is on it’s way!

Check out the video version of today’s announcements below.

Overall
Today’s announcements were positive for Windows Live Hotmail, but its important to remember there’s a long way to go. A number of the new features in the announcement today will make managing that mountain of email a whole lot easier. The ability to send Office documents to people without Office and know A. they can open them and B. they can edit them is awesome functionality.

For more information check out http://windowslivepreview.com/hotmail/new/

Next Tuesday I’ll be heading to Sydney for press lunch hosted by Microsoft’s Director of Marketing and MSN products – Alex Parsons. The Windows Live team will be showcasing a preview of the upcoming changes or 2011 versions of Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Essentials due out later this year.

You can expect lots of coverage of the event right here on techAU.tv so make sure you check back around lunch time on Tuesday 18th May. If you have any questions about the Microsoft products and services, leave a comment and I’ll try and get it answered.

The event is invite only.

A number of countries around the world are getting the standalone 250GB HDD for the Xbox 360. The UK being the latest example. As someone who has the 20GB launch console, I’m keen to see this available in Australia. I asked Xbox Australia about local availability and received the following response:

@techAU We don’t currently have anything to announce RE: 250GB HDD availability in Australia. If/when we do I’ll shout it loud! – jinx

The general trend internationally seems to be that the 250GB Xbox HDD will sell for the same price as the current 120GB model, which as Xbox fans know is pretty expensive. So until we hear different, the only way to get a 250GB HDD on your Xbox in Australia is to buy a special bundle.

Customization
The Bing Bar contains a number of configurable properties, Color schemes and seasonal scenes. You can also switch out the default shortcuts for a number of other services. These include Windows Live, Sports, Messenger and many others.

News and Weather and more
As with most Microsoft Products, it’s very US-centric, especially initially. That means the sources for this content are things like MSNBC and MSN Weather. The default Bing Bar also offers quick access to Stocks, Video and Hotmail.


Sign In
As with all the Live Essentials products, the Bing Bar connects with your LiveID account, this allows your preferences to sync across multiple machines.

The much anticipated Windows Live Wave 4 suite has landed. I got a chance to get hands on with the new suite of Essentials suite of applications from Microsoft. Rebranded as Windows Live Essentials this version includes:

• Windows Live Messenger,
• Windows Live Writer,
• Windows Live Photo Gallery,
• Windows Live Movie Maker
• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Live Sync
• Family Safety Family Safety

 
 
Windows Live Writer 2010
If your a blogging running Windows, then you’re likely using Windows Live Writer, if your not, you should be. Windows Live Writer 2010 supports the new ribbon UI consistent with other Windows 7 applications. In terms of functionality, it’s very much the same as the previous version, The main difference being that your options panel on the right is now in the context-sensitive ribbon. In the top left of the application you’ll also notice the menu bar has been replaces by an office 2010 style menu button.

Another small change is the move from having the category, tags and publish date toolbar up to the top directly under the Ribbon, personally I think this is a great decision. It can be easy to miss these before posting as they were positioned outside of your point of attention.

Windows Live Photo Gallery 2010
There’s a few new very useful features in the 2010 version of Windows Live Photo Gallery

People
Face detection is a feature available in most photo management applications these days and has been in WLPG for a while now. The new version comes with a much improved way to find people. The way you tag people hasn’t changed by the way you display all the photos of that person has. Using the Find Tab you can see the Top People and All People sections, the Top people are the most commonly tagged people in your gallery. Clicking on that person’s thumbnail will create a search filter which shows all the photos that contain that person.

Location
This is a brand new feature that allows users to add location information to their photos. After selecting one of more photos you can begin typing in the Location section of the info pane on the right. As you type is searches for places that may refer to your location, if it finds multiple entries, just select the one your after.

From here it works very similar to the faces search filter explained above. Clicking on the location will filter all photos taken at that location. Unfortunately there’s no quick access from the Find tab like there is for people, also there’s no mashup of your photos positioned on a map. As you can tell from the orange circle thumbnails, this is still in beta, so we may see that added before final release.

Windows Live Movie Maker 2010
Good news for fans of HD video, Windows Live Movie maker now supports up to 1080p video. There’s also convenient access to publishing your masterpiece on YouTube, SkyDrive and Facebook.

A feature with a lot of potential is AutoMovie themes. If your imagining something akin to what’s on offer in Apple’s iMovie, you’ll be bitterly disappointed. Windows Live Movie Maker’s AutoMovie themes simply add intro titles, closing credits and either transition effects like a fade between clips, or a video effect like colour to your movie. Sure this will be a time saver for people, it’s got a long way to go.

Windows Live Messenger 2010
Unfortunately this build of Windows Live Essentials doesn’t allow messenger to connect correctly. However there are still a couple of new things we can learn. After jumping into Tools > Options we see a couple new and noteworthy additions.

First and foremost, tabbed conversations are coming to Windows Live Messenger in 2010. Secondly there’s a new item under the Sign In section that lists a new Social Mode. Not sure what exactly this entails, however Windows Live already has strong integration with pretty much every social network out there. It’s likely a single view into what your friends have been up to online.

Something interesting to note is the image below of the Windows Live Messenger 2010 login screen is 100% pixel for pixel display of the smallest dimensions you can make the window. This is slightly concerning given that many of us use messenger in it’s tradition long rectangle form at the edge of the monitor. Reminder: still beta and this is by no means a detailed look at messenger, there could be a very good reason for this.

Update
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, there’s a patch available that opens Windows Live Messenger, revealing the following screen. The UI can indeed be dropped back to the traditional sidebar style by turning off social mode in the options.

Social View
Taking strong influence from the Zune / Windows Phone 7 UI, the new Social view. This works great in Full-screen view. Time to get another monitor, call it the Social monitor.

Windows Live Mail 2010
Mail looks, well, like you expect mail to look. Like the rest of the 2010 Live Essentials apps, the ribbon features heavily in the application’s functionality. You’ll notice the right hand column includes calendar entries of different colours, these represent entries from multiple Windows Live calendars.

Setup was incredibly simple, just sign in and the Live Sync agent takes care of the rest. Windows Live Mail is actually a really capable mail client, the more the application evolves, the less of a reason non-domain users have for Outlook. Although webmail is sufficient in most scenarios, it’s nice to have a rich client or a least a local backup of your mail.

Just like the iPhone’s iPod application, podcasts can be played in the background while using the other features of the devices. This is in-line with Microsoft’s announcement of selective background processes. My only criticism of the UI is that it cuts off the podcast episode titles, sure this is not unlike the iPhone, but it could be solved by simply scrolling the text. Who knows it may be adjusted before the final release, which keep in mind is still between 7-9 months away.