Sunday, November 21, 2010

Windows Live 2011 released

I use only a few of the Windows Live applications, the ones I find good use for are Writer (for this blog in fact), Sync (to keep automated backups of critical folders), and Movie Maker (once in a while WMM works better than Pinnacle or Nero.)

This new generation looks very slick … Microsoft are clearly raising the bar on the quality of applications and features on Windows 7 … my guess is that they will continue to push vendors to improve or get crushed by the free stuff. This makes sense to me, as Apple has a lot of very good yet inexpensive applications, and it does not do for Microsoft applications to come of as crude. Worse, to come off as low value for the money.

The new Writer has an interface that is now reminiscent of Word 2007 (or more probably, 2010), which is a very good thing, as it makes editing web content a trivial thing. This little fluff piece was written just so I could play with the new Writer.

The interface is tabbed just like the latest Office apps.

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They’ve added some powerful embedding features now … video is an example, where you have three choices for videos to embed, as shown in this screen shot:

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I’ve always liked the table creation on the insert tab … makes HTML tables as easy as Word. But they’ve added map embedding for Bing, Tag editing for numerous services, and a huge array of emoticons. The editor translates inline as well … very useful stuff.

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So try this out if you are a blogger and are still using built in web tools for editing. You might just like the Office feel and the nice WYSIWYG features.

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