As we get closer to the public beta of Windows Live Wave 4, more and more features and screenshots are emerging onto the Internet. Over the past few weeks there has been a slew of screenshots of various applications and services revealing Windows Live Wave 4, including Writer, Mail, Photo Gallery, Messenger, and Documents and Devices.
LiveSino.net has just revealed one of the new features Windows Live Home will sport: Web Messenger integration. The feature will be located in the header of the Home page, along with a control panel to allow you to select your status.
Windows Live Home is a service that aggregates all the data from your Windows Live Network, your local weather conditions, headlines from your favorite websites, as well as a preview of the first three e-mail messages in your Hotmail inbox.
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.
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.
