14 DAY TRIAL // A fresh Beta development milestone of the next generation of Windows Live Essentials is now available for download.
Microsoft released Build 15.4.3001.0809 earlier this week, introducing updates for all the suite’s components, including Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Mail, and Family Safety.
According to Chris Jones, Vice President, Windows Live Engineering, feedback from early adopters contributed greatly to improving Windows Live Essentials Wave 4.
Still, the Beta Refresh of Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh brings more to the table than just bug fixes.
In this regard, Jones opted to emphasize a selection of new features marking the evolution of the Essentials 2011 suite from Beta 1, which was offered to testers earlier this summer.
“Here are some of the many improvements you’ll see:
•A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
•More efficient video chat - Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
•Better facial recognition - Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
•Larger movie uploads - Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480x640 vs. the previous 320x480).
•Higher bit-rate movies - Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
•Better spell-checking - Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
•Better integration with Office - Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
•Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
•Faster web filtering - Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version,” Jones noted.
Microsoft has also worked on the quality of the Beta release. Jones explained that over 75% of the crashes reported for Beta 1 have been resolved in Build 15.4.3001.0809.
Of course, the company also noted that not all issues highlighted from customer input could be identified, replicated and resolved.
“We’re always working to improve the performance and quality of our services and we’ve made significant progress in this area in today’s beta update,” Jones said.
“This includes things like decreasing the time it takes to start each program or render each webpage, and improving the quality of your experiences. It often takes hundreds of small improvements and optimizations to better the final experience,” he added.
There are a few specific changes that truly improve the user experience of Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh over the previous, plain vanilla release.
One of these is the bridging of Windows Live Messenger 2011 and Facebook, in terms of chat support. Read more details about this new feature here.
Microsoft has also kicked up a notch the capabilities of Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011, with support for geotagging, but also for quick previews and improved tree view.
“One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option.” Jones explained.
“With the beta update, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.”
In addition to connecting closely with Facebook, Microsoft has also worked to help Flickr users better upload their content.
Windows Live Movie Maker now allows customers to publishing their video content right to Flickr.
“With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing,” Jones noted.
Windows Live Essentials 2011 Build 15.4.3001.0809 is available for download here.