Mike’s Thoughts

Windows Live. You may have heard of it, but how much do you really know about it? Microsoft, in an effort to slim down its Windows 7 installation, has decided to take a different direction. No longer will you find the OS bloated with applications, like Mail, Movie Maker, or Photo Gallery, that you may never use. The idea is that users who want, and will actually use these applications, can download them for free from Live.com.

However, although Windows 7 is still a way from being released, many of the Live services are available for download right now. Although I have professional video organization/tweaking software (Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom), I decided to give Live Photo Gallery a try. This is the same product featured on the “Mojave” commercials. I also decided to give Live Writer a try. Here’s what I found out.

Windows Live Writer

Live Writer serves one purpose, and it serves it well: blogging. Writer connects to a Live Spaces blog, a SharePoint blog, or virtually any other blogging platform in seconds. I’m even writing this post, which as you know is powered by WordPress, in Writer. It connected to my blog with three pieces of information: the URL, my username, and my password. That’s it. Now, I did need to enable an option in my settings, but Writer told me exactly what needed to be enabled and where to enable it.

After connecting to the blog, Writer temporarily creates a blank post, so that it can download information about your blog, including themes, categories, and more. When you are ready to create a post, you actually see your theme, with the text overlaying it, in the appropriate fonts and colors relating to your theme.

The interface allows for easy additions of pictures, hyperlinks, tables, maps, tags, videos, and more. Additional items can be added to your posts via Plug-ins that can be added to Live Writer. The interface also has one click access to your WordPress Dashboard, blog comments, as well a link to your blog itself.

All in all, this is a very feature rich application that allows you to easily create blog posts from within a professional feeling application, which also allows you to save local copies of your blog posts, just in case something happens.

The only issue I found with this service is that my host does not like the way Live Writer uploads the images that I put in my posts. To remedy this, you simply configure the account to upload via FTP instead of directly to the blog. (If you need help with this, please post a comment, and I will provide detailed instructions).

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is very similar to Windows Photo Gallery, which is included in Windows Vista. Live Photo Gallery allows you to organize, tag, and fix your photos. The big difference between the Vista and Live versions is that the Live version allows you to automatically create panoramas from your photos with surprising accuracy. The results are similar to a panorama created with Adobe Photoshop. Obviously they are not as good, but they are quite impressive. The major issue with the Live panoramas is that they do not do any sort of optimization or color correction with the photos, so they can appear slightly off. However, for what they are, they are quite good.

Below is a group of five photos that I took, not intending to create a panorama. I created one using Live Photo Gallery and one using Adobe Photoshop CS4. Judge for yourself.

The originals

The panorama generated with Live Photo Gallery (above)

The panorama generated with Adobe Photoshop CS4 (above)