14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is making headway toward the RTM of Windows Live Essentials 2011 / Wave 4. And the Redmond company is reportedly gearing up to release a new development milestone following the two Beta Builds it has already provided to early adopters for testing.
Before it can be released to manufacturing, Windows Live Essentials 2011 needs to jump through the Release Candidate (RC) hoop, which is just around the corner.
Windows Live Essentials 2011 RC is apparently planned for availability next week, on September 9th, 2010, according to an anonymous source from Russia close to Microsoft, cited by GeekSmack.
Microsoft has yet to offer official confirmation of the Windows Live Essentials RC launch deadline, but then again, the software giant was also last to announce the availability dates for the original Beta and the Beta Refresh milestones.
However, despite the silence, the Redmond company is by no means inactive. The third-party source that unveiled the RC date also noted that work has been done to push Windows Live Essentials 2011 to the next level.
In this sense, as Microsoft already announced, Windows Live Sync will become Windows Live Mesh after Live Mesh was folded into Sync earlier this year. It appears that with the RC development milestone testers will get the first chance to run the rebranded Sync, now Windows Live Mesh.
Additional optimizations have hit the installer, which will come to the table with a redesigned graphical user interface. On top of the new UI tweaks the Windows Live Essentials 2011 logo will act as the installer from RC onward.
The introduction of the Refresh Button to the social stream has already been confirmed by another source, which pointed out that Microsoft continues to release interim releases of post-Betas Refresh Windows Live Essentials 2011.
There are a variety of new details cooking for the Release Candidate, including bug fixes, performance improvements, and apparently, installing the RC will no longer require a restart (another aspect confirmed by another third-party source for interim builds of Windows Live Essentials 2011).
When I last wrote about the Windows Live Essential 2011, I mentioned that an anonymous source had indicated that Wave 4 was up to Build 15.4.3117.0831.
The development process has moved forward since then, and the latest Build is 15.4.3119.0902, which is not the fully-fledged RC.
At the same time, the advent of Windows Live Essentials 2011 RC will bring with it the removal of the Beta label from the various clients making up the suite, including Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Mesh, etc.
Release Candidate is a phase of the development process which indicates that Microsoft is nearly done with a piece of software. In this context, users should be expecting the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Live Essentials soon.
Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 Build 15.4.3001.0809 is available for download here.