David Flynn13 November 2008, 3:00 PM
Photo Gallery and Movie Maker apps, released today as part of the new Windows Live ‘Wave 3’ family, are the first to replace their Vista counterparts in Microsoft's next-gen OS
If you’ve already installed one of the pre-beta Windows 7 builds
courtesy of BitTorrent, now you can take it a step closer to being the real deal.
Included in today’s worldwide launch of Windows Live Wave 3, the third generation of Microsoft’s online services, are the cloud-based apps that will take care of your email, photos and home movies in Windows 7 rather than use OS-resident software.
Windows Live Mail has been out for some time, of course, but now you can download the new Windows Live Photo Gallery app plus a beta of Windows Live Movie Maker.
Unlike pure cloud apps that live only online, each of these has a fully functional offline mode. However, they also have extensive hooks into an online equivalent.
“Probably in our lifetime the offline experience is going to remain very important” explains Darren Huston, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Consumer and Online International. “Even if you had the best broadband connection in the world every once in a while it’s going to go down. And it’s going to be somewhat slower than things you can do locally because you’ve got everything in this box rather than in the cloud, everything’s closer together. So whether you have only dial-up or are sitting on an airplane you can still have a good client experience without being connected.”
In the case of Windows Live Photo Gallery, its Webside counterpart is the new Windows Live Photo service for organising and sharing your snaps – pretty similar to the way that Google’s Picassa and Picasa Web Albums work together.
The desktop app, which can be downloaded on its own or as part of the Windows Live Essentials bundle, covers the obligatory tasks of basic editing, rating and tagging and organising into albums, but with some extra delights such as automatic face detection. Pics can then be uploaded to the Windows Live Photos service for online viewing and sharing, creating group albums and also Facebook-style tagging and commenting through Windows Live’s social networking features.
Windows 7 is also expected to tap into the enhanced Windows Live SkyDrive online file storage service, which in Wave 3 sees its capacity boosted from 5GB to 25GB.
“More and more services that were on the Windows desktop are now being put into the cloud” Huston says. “What you’re seeing in Wave 3 is a lot of applications on Windows being moved into the cloud, and more and more things being linked together. And by the time of Windows 7 we’ll be in Wave 4 and you’ll see more integration in terms of how Windows Live connects with Windows”.