A new Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 Milestone 3 screenshot has leaked onto the Internet, spotted by LiveSide.net. We can confirm the screenshot is genuine and looks identical to ones we have seen and published over the past few months.
From the screenshot you can see a collapsible “social” pane on the left hand side which includes the latest posts from Facebook and Windows Live. Windows Live Messenger also appears to have support for more social networks than just Facebook and Windows Live, similar to what Windows Phone 7 Series is receiving.
Facebook integration not only shows the feed, but looks like it will allow commenting, photos and filtered feeds, including highlights, recent, my profile (me), photos and more. It doesn’t appear from the screenshot that Windows Live Messenger allows Facebook Chat, but Facebook recently opened its XMPP chat protocol to the masses so it could be possible in future.
Microsoft has also included SkyDrive support, possibly for sharing photos, documents and storage media. A new way to share your online photo albums with your contacts is shown. Note: “Mary North” has posted “via SkyDrive.”
The Inside Windows Live team also posted a short history of Windows Messenger recently, including a screenshot of the new emoticons:
Liveside is reporting that new screenshots of Windows Live Mail Wave 4 have surfaced, as well as a bunch of features that will be integrated into various products. They have also uncovered that Windows Live Mail Wave 4 may have fully integrated GMail support for archiving, labels and stars too, making it the first mail client to officially support these features.
Information about Windows Live Wave 4 is slowly trickling in – a few weeks ago BlogoFlux revealed the new Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 UI, along with a bunch of features, such as better Windows 7 superbar integration, as well as tabbed chats which is a very frequently requested feature (even though some 3rd party applications offer to add it for you).
Mail screenshots have surfaced previously, but these new screenshots show the UI has come much further from a few short weeks ago. As you can see in the new screenshots below, Windows Live mail is now fully integrated with the ribbon UI, much like Outlook 2010. The new build also sports a calendar in the right sidebar, very much similar to that in Outlook 2010 – except this calendar comes straight from your Windows Live calendar.
The build of Windows Live Mail also shows it finally has conversation view, a much needed feature, especially if the company is going for better GMail integration. Take a closer look at the conversation view below.
Please remember that while these screenshots are real, the UI may change, and will likely not reflect the final product upon release. The first public beta is expected within the next two months.
Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 will come with tabbed conversations, much the same way Internet Explorer 8 works. Other noticeable changes are the “X” close button at the bottom of user’s messenger windows, possibly allowing users to hide the advertisement.
Other changes are in the “Select an Emoticon” menu, with a rearrangement of icons with Winks now included. The sharing photos feature has been updated to share your photo albums online and search for photos online with your contact, using Bing images.
Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 will also allow Twitter, Facebook and blog posts directly in your contact list.
All images courtesy of Livesino.net
Reminder: These are likely to be shots from early builds so may not reflect the final UI.
Earlier this month we revealed Microsoft’s upcoming release of Windows Live Messenger 2010 (Part of Wave 4). This week the guys over at Geeksmack have gotten a hold of a few screenshots of Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Photo Gallery. The screenshots are of build 15.0.2403.826, which should be noted is very early versions of Wave 4 and it is expected that much will change before the actual beta early next year.
Not much can be said about the two above screenshots except that both Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail both now feature a Ribbon UI.
In an interesting move, it appears that Windows Live writer will now sport a new menu similar to Microsoft Office. The orange icons are currently a placeholder, and will not be in the final build. Not much is known about the current internal builds shown above, but as far as we can tell it appears that no new features have been added at this point.
