I’m Cheryl White and I’m a Program Manager for Windows Live Movie Maker. I’m here to say again how much we appreciate getting your feedback – it helps us to build a better product. Also, I’d like to talk more specifically about how users helped us shape the latest release of Windows Live Movie Maker. We’ve heard many questions about why we didn’t go with a traditional timeline model in the new Movie Maker. In this post we’re going to provide some insight into the primary reasons we changed our design, as well as a comparison between the old and new design based on organizing and editing media.

When we started building Windows Live Movie Maker, we looked at the feedback we received from our users. One of the points that stood out to us was that the average Windows Movie Maker user was intimidated by the timeline interface. Specifically, they felt there was a fairly steep learning curve to the product, and that many tasks were made difficult by the amount of steps it took to complete them. With this in mind, we wanted to use a visual solution in the new Windows Live Movie Maker that allowed both video enthusiasts and novice users a way to organize and edit their media quickly and easily. We wanted to eliminate intimidating interfaces, while still being able to manage more complex tasks. Below you will find a side-by-side comparison of the two versions with regards to organizing and editing media.

Windows Movie Maker (old) vs. Windows Live Movie Maker (new)

Adding media to your project

A big focus in the new release was to make it easy to add content and immediately see how the movie was put together. Compared to Windows Movie Maker, you first had to import your media to your collection, then add your media to your project. Only after which you would be able to preview your movie. In the new release, we simplified the process: Import your media to your project, preview your movie. The whole task can be done in seconds, yet you don’t lose any functionality. Another process we simplified in the new release of Movie Maker was to ensure that the preview window showed only the media that you were focused on in the Storyboard at any given time. The old release of Movie Maker could show media that was in your library as well as media that was in your project. There were advantages to this (as you could see photos and videos before you add them to your project) but this increased the complexity and confused novice users. The new design greatly reduces confusion, if it’s in your preview window – it’s in your project.

Based on a user study we performed in March, we made a late-breaking decision to add click on the Storyboard to add content. Since the Storyboard is the core of the application, we decided that we wanted to give you a range of options to choose from when it comes to adding media to your project: dragging and dropping files from your computer; clicking or right-clicking on the Storyboard; clicking “Add videos and photos” right in the Ribbon, from Photo Gallery clicking Make-> Make a Movie with media selected.

In the older Windows Movie Maker timeline view, users found it difficult to move items around easily and particularly difficult to adjust text. So we made adding text easier! Previously, there was a 4-step process to add title at the beginning of your movie. With Windows Live Movie Maker, one click adds the title and immediately puts you into editing mode right on the screen. It’s all WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) so you can adjust easily make adjustments by entering text and then grabbing the text box with the mouse to move it around.

Viewing the project

When it comes to viewing your project, the Storyboard view has multiple benefits over the traditional Timeline view. Something to keep in mind, both are technically linear ‘timeline’ views. But instead of the timeline being one long ‘scroll right, and right, and right to view your content’ view, the Storyboard starts at the top left, scrolls right to the edge of your application window and then drops a line to start again on the left (Like a book!). Which is automatically resized as your adjust the size of Windows Live Movie Maker. This allows users to have a broader view of what’s happening in their project. Compared to the Windows Movie Maker, the task of organizing content is made exponentially easier in the storyboard.

Below is an example of ‘viewing your project’. I have nine pieces of content plus a title slide (just for example) and I want to zoom in far enough to see thumbnails of each piece of content. On the left hand side, I have Windows Movie Maker. Here I can only see four and a quarter items in my movie. Compared to Windows Live Movie Maker on the right and I can see all my content easily with plenty of room to spare.

Zoomed Out/Full Storyboard vs. Storyboard

In making the move to the new Storyboard, we found that people who wanted to see a storyboard-like representation of their items were not getting enough information at that level. Conversely, people were getting too much information with the timeline representation, so we worked at hitting a happy medium between the two. We have a time scale zoom in the new Windows Live Movie Maker that allows you to adjust the ‘viewable’ length of your media. The scale goes from individual seconds (on the precise side – see right side Windows Live Movie Maker image below), to only showing each piece of media as a thumbnail regardless of length of time each piece plays for on the broader scale. This allows you to still use relative lengths with your clips, without it being an all or nothing approach.

Zoomed In/Timeline vs. Storyboard with Time Scale

Moving items in the project

Once people add in their content, we wanted to make sure that it was easy to move items around. Showing the thumbnail of each item at any timescale means that you can step back and take a look at the big picture and make sure everything ended up just where you wanted it. In the image below, I am dragging the Chrysanthemum picture to appear after the lighthouse. Super easy with the thumbnails, but it was very difficult to get to it in the timeline version without zooming in on the timeline.

Editing items in your project

And the last main area in which we focused was to make sure that it was easy to edit items once they were added to the project. With the new Storyboard, batch edits are a snap. Using the Ribbon, we put the tools you use most often in the most logical places. Edit a video clip is under Video Tools. Changing transitions is under Animations.

But when it comes to true ‘differences’ between the old Windows Movie Maker and the new Windows Live Movie Maker, batch editing is right at the top. By allowing users to multi-select and perform edits on more than one item at a time, we’ve dramatically decreased the time it takes to polish and edit your movie. In the case below, I had to drag and drop a transition onto each and every item. In Windows Live Movie Maker, we’ve made that so easy, you just select the items you want (or CTRL+A to select all), choose a transition and you can apply it to all of the clips. To tell if your item has a transition on it, look for the slightly transparent triangle in the lower left corner of your content thumbnails.

So there you have it. A little background into how your feedback helped us build Windows Live Movie Maker. Ultimately, we are creating the product for you to use, and if there are any areas in which you’re feeling pain, let us know. We want to change that!  We’ve already gotten some really good feedback, and hope to continue receiving more.  I love Windows Live Movie Maker and I hope you will too!

Cheryl White

Program Manager

Windows Live Movie Maker

Excited about the new Zune HD? We are! A built-in HD Radio receiver, high-definition (HD) video output capabilities, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) multi-touch screen, Wi-Fi and an Internet browser… Zune HD is the first portable media player to provide all of these technologies on one device.  Oh, and by the way, did we mention that its less than 9 mm thick and only weighs 2.6 ounces!... :)

If you don’t already own one, check out http://www.zune.net for more details. If you do own one, then check out these new custom profiles for Windows Live Movie Maker. They let you save movies in a format that’s perfect for the Zune HD.

We also have a new “HD Fullscreen” (4:3 aspect ratio) profile that saves high-resolution (1440x1080) WMV video files. This new profile is ideal for making HD movies without letterboxing. This works great when you’re using photos in your movie that have a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Note: When using the HD Full Screen profile, set your project to use a standard (4:3) aspect ratio to get the most out of this profile. (To set the project aspect ratio in Windows Live Movie Maker, on the View tab, click Aspect ratio, and then click Standard.)

At the end, we’ll provide a link to an article that explains how you can make your own custom profiles to use in Windows Live Movie Maker.

New Custom Profiles

We have two custom profiles for you that let you save movies in Movie Maker in a format that works great on the new Zune HD, as well as play from a Zune HD device to an HDTV at 720p resolution².

²Zune HD player screen shows supported 720p HD videos at 480 x 272—not HD resolution. HDTV and Zune HD AV Dock (all sold separately) are required to view video at 720p HD resolution.

The “Zune HD – Device” profile will create a WMV file with a resolution and bitrate that matches the playback characteristics of the Zune HD device (480x272).

Next, the “Zune HD - 720p High Definition” profile is optimized for playing back content directly from the Zune device via the Zune HD AV Dock. It uses a slightly higher bit-rate and more advanced Windows Media codecs (Windows Media Audio 10 Pro & Windows Media Video Advanced Profile) than the standard 720p profile built into Windows Live Movie Maker.

You can download and install these custom profiles (and the custom icon for the Zune profiles) by following these steps.

1. Download this compressed (ZIP) file: http://cid-2f7eb29b42641d59.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/NewProfiles.zip

2. Extract the files to a new folder on your computer. You will see the following files:

ZuneHDNative.prx

ZuneHDNative.ico

ZuneHD720p.prx

ZuneHD720p.ico

HD Fullscreen.prx

3. Copy these files to one of the following locations on your computer (depending on if your computer is running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows):

- 32-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles
- 64-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles

4. Restart Windows Live Movie Maker.

Creating Your Own Custom Profiles

If you want to make your own custom profiles to use in Windows Live Movie Maker, see the article Use custom settings to save a movie in Windows Live Movie Maker on the Windows website.

- Mike Morrison, Windows Live Movie Maker team

Members of the Windows Live Writer team attended WordCamp Seattle on Sept 26, 2009. WordCamps are annual gatherings for learning about all things WordPress, hosted in various cities across the country. It’s a great way to learn more about WordPress and network with other WordPress users. The Writer team was there in force giving demos of Writer publishing to WordPress.  Many people aren’t aware of how well Live Writer works with WordPress. It gives users a completely WYSIWYG publishing experience and it makes publishing photos and video simple.

In preparation for the event, developer Brandon Turner created three new Live Writer plug-ins to use with WordPress blogs. These new plug-ins enable —comments management, custom fields, and blog title/tagline editor. If you are a blogger yourself, you might want to check these out.

Here is a quick overview of the plug-ins:

• The first plugin lets you change the title and tagline of your blog. Often times you have seen the default Just another Wordpress.com weblog. If you enter your Twitter username and click 'import from twitter' it will import a recent twitter status as your blog tagline. It will look for your most recent status that is not an @ reply and doesn't contain a link.

• The second plugin allows you to manage comments on your Wordpress blog from inside of Windows Live Writer. 'New' means that the comment has been posted but it is waiting for moderation. 'Approved' means the comment has been published and is visible to all users on your blog. 'Spam' are comments that have been detected as spam and are hidden from your blog. Clicking the words across the top will show you a list of comments in each of those sections.

• The, third plugin, called custom field plugin lets you add wordpress custom fields to your blog. This plugin shows up after you have clicked publish inside of Windows Live Writer. The first time you click publish once the plug in is installed it will ask you if you want to enable it. Click 'yes' when you see the dialog below.

Then the next dialog will show up. This will allow you to enter new custom fields for your blog. Enter the key/values for the custom field in the grid below. And when you are done you can close the dialog, it will save the custom fields to your blog. The next time you come back to this dialog, there will be links on the top with the keys you have entered in the past. This way, if you always insert the same custom fields, you will only have to enter them the first time. When selected on a custom field, you can click the checkbox. This will generate a snippet of PHP code which you can use in your Wordpress theme to display the custom field.

These plugins are available for use and further development (the linked DLL and Zip file contains all the new plug-ins)

Additionally there are many other Writer plugins available to do almost anything you can imagine.  Check out gallery.live.com for a list of free writer plugins.

Best,

Windows Live Writer team

For all those out there looking for an edge when using Movie Maker, here are some examples of more advanced features we’ve added to Movie Maker.

Today we’ll examine three areas of Movie Maker that should appeal to more advanced users:

1. Video Editing Keyboard Shortcuts

2. Leveraging Multiple Monitors

3. Creating Time-Lapse Videos

Video Editing Keyboard Shortcuts

Advanced users typically appreciate having keyboard shortcuts for most common actions and commands. In Windows Live Movie Maker we support all of the standard Windows and Office shortcut keys (i.e. Save, Open, Undo, Redo, Cut/Copy/Paste, etc…). You can find a list of all of our keyboard shortcuts here (or by choosing Help and searching on the word ‘keyboard’).

Today I would like to call attention to some keyboard shortcuts that apply more directly to video editing. First of all a quick one is the Play/Pause toggle (the ‘space’ bar or the ‘K’ key). Why the ‘K’ key? Well, commonly used shortcut keys in video editing programs include “J”, “K” and “L”. The “J” keys steps back one frame while the “L” key jumps forward one frame. Since the keyboard repeats you can hold down the “L” key and depending on the size of your video (and performance of your PC) you can get almost real-time playback. When using the “J” and “L” keys it’s convenient to use the “K” key to Play/Pause the video.

Next, another common action is to Trim the beginning or end of the video and Split a video. In Movie Maker these commands are based on the current cursor (caret) position. So you can scrub to a specific point in a video clip then press the “M” key to Split the video at exactly that point. The “I” key will trim off the beginning (from the caret position) and the “O” key will trim off the end of the video (from the caret position).

While we no longer have the timeline in Windows Live Movie Maker we now have a simple storyboard. The new Storyboard is approachable to the most novice user yet, it can still represent time visually! To zoom in (expand time) on the storyboard use the “+” key while the zoom out shortcut is the “-“ key (go figure…). You’ll note however that when we zoom in that the thumbnail representing the video clip is simply replicated.

Quick Access toolbar

Admittedly there are a lot of features exposed in the new “Scenic” ribbon that don’t have keyboard shortcuts. The good news though is that if you add those features to the Quick Access area of the Ribbon then you can use the keyboard shortcuts ALT-1 through ALT-0 to access those features!

To add a QAT (‘Quick Access Toolbar’ as we call it) shortcut, simply right-click on any button in the Ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar”:

It will then show up in the QAT and you can use the assigned “ALT” key to access it (press “ALT” to see what key is assigned to your new QAT entry).

Multiple Monitor Support

Since Windows seamlessly supports multiple monitors, we do too! This means that you can size the window for Windows Live Movie Maker across two separate monitors to get a nice, large Preview Window along with a large screen to use with the Storyboard:

Time-Lapse Videos

Enthusiasts come in all shapes, sizes, and ages! My kids, ages 11 and 14 love making movies and one of their favorite types of movies is a Time-Lapse. Here you take a lot of photos (either manually or via software that comes with you camera) and load them into Windows Live Movie Maker. Then simply set the photo duration to “.03” seconds for each photo (you can do that quickly by selecting all of the photos at once before changing the duration).

Here’s an example of my son Jade building an airplane from Lego’s. I set my camera up on a tripod and manually shot a picture of him every couple of minutes.

Another example video is posted here

We’re planning on the next wave now, we’ve heard your feedback on network and codec support – we’re looking to add more enthusiast oriented features as well! Please send us your ideas and features you would love to see.

- Mike Morrison, Windows Live Movie Maker Team

By now you’ve already seen how quick and easy it is to make and share a movie using Windows Live Movie Maker.  So instead of showing you how to post a video to an online service, I thought I’d discuss an alternative way of sharing your content using Movie Maker, Windows 7, and Xbox 360.  With so many great web services available to stay in touch and exchange media with friends and family, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the most enjoyable form of consuming your own content is to sit down with the people you care about and flip through an album or watch a home movie on the television.  But how do you get your Windows Live Movie Maker creation up on the big screen?  Well, you could always hook up a PC to your TV or burn a physical DVD, but let’s try something a little more “on-demand” than that.

I’m an avid climber and I love taking photos up in the mountains, but sometimes the grandeur of the scenery is lost when I show people my photos and videos on a laptop screen or share them through a web service. Instead, I’ll put my movie together in Movie Maker and display it on the TV by streaming through my Xbox 360.  This way, when I have friends and family over, we don’t all have to huddle around the computer screen – we can sit back with a snack and share the experience. 

Keep in mind, this post assumes a few things;

1. You’re running Windows 7 on your PC.

2. You have an Xbox.

3. You have a home network set up.

If you’re running Windows Vista, you should be able to accomplish the same result. Click here for information on streaming using Windows Vista. With that said, here’s how I do it on Windows 7.

First, I need to make a movie. I want to put together a slideshow combining photos and short video clips I took during the climb with an awesome soundtrack.  I’ll start in Windows Live Photo Gallery, where I can see all of my content.  I’ll select all of the photos and videos I want to use, click on the ‘Make’ button, then select ‘Make a movie…’ to launch Windows Live Movie Maker.  I’m going to use AutoMovie to quickly compile my content into a polished movie.  Then, I output my movie using our 1080p profile for maximum resolution and maximum viewing experience.  I save the movie to my local hard drive in a folder that is part of my Videos library.  I have this library set up so that its contents can be streamed to other devices on my home network.  Here’s how you can do this:

First, click the start button icon in the lower left of the toolbar. In the Windows 7 Start Menu search box, type “media streaming” as follows:

Launch ‘Media streaming options’ and you’ll see this:

Turn on media streaming, and you’ll get the following options:

Be sure to name your media library, which by default will be the name of your computer.  That’s all there is to it!  You can customize the settings if you like, but as is, anything in your Pictures, Videos, or Music Libraries will be visible to other media-streaming-capable machines on your network, including your Xbox 360.

Now that my movie has been saved and my media streaming options are set up, I turn on my Xbox 360.  Under the ‘My Xbox’ heading, I navigate to my ‘Video Library’ and select it.  At this point, I’m asked to select my source.  My Xbox sees my computer as a source and lists it as an option, so I’ll scroll down and select it.  Once I’ve done that, I can navigate by folder and find the movie I just created.

And that’s it, I can control playback straight through my Xbox and watch the movie with friends right in my family room.  The great thing about this is that you only have to set up media streaming once.  After that, anytime you save a movie on your computer, it will be visible to your Xbox so it’s ready to go whenever you want to watch it on your TV!

On a similar note, since we live in such a digitally connected world, I get my friends asking me to share my movies online so they can watch it again later.  Sharing to YouTube is always a great option, but what if there’s a different online website they regularly visit?  No problem – Windows Live Movie Maker shares the same online publishing platform as Windows Live Photo Gallery, which means developers can write publishing plug-ins to any website or service using our Software Developer Kit (SDK) and whatever SDK is available from that service.  Check out this page for a list of plug-ins that have already been written, and for more information on how to write your own plug-in using our SDK, visit http://dev.live.com/photogallery.  If you’ve written a plug-in, please tell us about it!

Thanks and happy streaming!

- Karthik Anbalagan

The rapid pace of innovation and competition among camera manufacturers has put increasingly impressive technologies into the hands of ever more people. The number of megapixels in consumer-level cameras has gone up, and new features in cameras and software like Windows Live Photo Gallery make it even easier to do creative things like making panoramas with your photos.

In the past, if you tried to upload your beautiful new panoramas to Windows Live Photos in their original size, you couldn’t view them right on the site. Today we’re rolling out a new release of Photos that bumps our limit on photo size up—way up. You are now able to get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels – more than enough to accommodate even this panorama:

 
Click for full-size image 

We’ve also taken a magnifying glass to the image quality of photos—in all their various sizes—throughout the site. We wanted to add more “wow” to your pictures, and we think our changes make everything from thumbnails to images viewed in the slideshow look noticeably better.

We’re super excited about those improvements, but we know that if moving through a photo album takes forever, it may not matter how beautiful your photos are. We’ve also put a lot of work into making photo albums faster to browse through—you no longer have to wait for the entire page to refresh when you move between photos. Plus, you can browse through your photos using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. You can try it out in this album:

To try out these new, cool features go to Windows Live Photos.

We hope all of these improvements make it even easier and more fun for you to tell your stories and share the exciting moments of your life with your family and friends!

- The Windows Live Photos team

As you may know, you can add a “Web Activity” for Facebook (click here) and bring your status, photos, shared links, and more from Facebook into Windows Live to share in Messenger, Hotmail, and on your Windows Live Profile.  What you may not know is that if you add the Facebook web activity, the data is passed from Facebook to Windows Live using a developing open standard called “Activity Streams.”  With hundreds of thousands of users since release a few months ago, the Windows Live web activity for Facebook might be the largest implementation of Activity Streams today.  My personal thanks to Jerry Cain, Mike Vernal, and the others engineers at Facebook who designed and built Facebook’s Activity Streams implementation. 

Just as many of our other web activities leverage community standards like RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, and MediaRSS, I’m hopeful that Activity Streams will be a powerful enabling technology so users can bring their activities like status updates, posted photos, or shared links, from one service to another; and looking forward to working with other partners to enable our mutual users to share their activities between services. 

If you haven’t already done so, check it out today by clicking here

Thanks—

--Rob Dolin

Program Manager, Windows Live team

12 more days until the big day - Messenger’s 10th Anniversary!  So here’s another Fun Fact from the Windows Live Messenger team, along with the latest story from one of our Messenger users.

Messenger Fun Fact:
1) The typing indicator () seems trivial today, but actually it was a tricky problem back in the early days – how could you show that someone was entering a message without showing every single character (and their typos). The Messenger team invented the typing indicator for that purpose, which today is used by every chat client.

2) The nudge was introduced with MSN Messenger 7.0 on April 7^th 2005. Since then it is even easier to get attention from your favorite chat partner - even if they might not always appreciate your nudges! ;-)

I didn’t even know that the Messenger team invented the “typing indicator” until today, but I don’t know what I’d do without it! :)  

Now for today’s user story, in his own words…

Lenin from Ecuador writes:

Hi, this is Lenin, writing from Cuenca, Ecuador.

Technology has been one of my passions for my whole life and since Internet appeared I haven’t gone away from my computer. I spent hours in the IRC channels until someone had the genial idea of creating MSN Messenger (in those faraway times).

It was the best thing that could have happened to chats, in all chats and IRCs, people were typing: “Use the Messenger", and everyone was speaking of its big usefulness. After spending a week chatting with someone, it was: "Give me your 'Hotmail' so I can add you to mess".

And since that era, 1999, in all the cybercafés it was heard the nice wav sound: "new message" at every moment. Everyone was using it, times changed, years passed, there were new versions released with new features and in every computer it was essential to have Messenger.

And now, 10 years after, being called Windows Live Messenger and having the chance to change the sound for new messages or nudges, but I don’t do it because I’m used to that "toorooroon", it is part of my life. All my contacts are there, I’ve changed my Passport something like 5 times, but my buddies remain, all my life is there.

Greets...!  

For more great Messenger stories, and to get to know the team who has been helping to build the Messenger you know and love today, check us out the Messenger team blog.

- The Messenger team

We announced in February that Windows Live was piloting a new feature unique to Hotmail we’re calling “quick add.”* Today, we’re happy to announce that Bing – Microsoft’s decision engine – has come to Windows Live Hotmail quick add, allowing you to “Bing and Decide” from the comfort of your inbox.

With Hotmail’s quick add feature, now enhanced with Bing, you can easily search, find, and insert content from the web straight into your e-mail messages. With just one click you can add restaurant reviews, movie times, images, videos, maps and more.

Give it a try:

1. Click New to create a new e-mail message.
2. Select a category from the Quick add pane on the right.
3. Type what you want to find in the Bing search box.
4. Click Insert on the Bing search result that you’d like to add to your message

To try it firsthand, go to Windows Live Hotmail and check out the right-hand side of the screen when composing a new message. Let us know how you like it.

   - Your Windows Live Hotmail team

* Currently available in select languages and geographies (Australia, Canada, China, India, US, and UK)

Comments
Sorry, but we’ve temporarily blocked reader comments due to the volume of recent comments that violate our code of conduct. If you have feedback, now as always, we're listening. Please use the following links to send us feedback or get help.
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The 10th Anniversary of Windows Live Messenger is less than 2 weeks away.  As part of the celebration, we’re posting fun/touching stories from users, and today’s Messenger story was sent to us from Mr. Zhang in China.  It’s a great story. Let us know if you’ve tried this yourself and what your results were! :)

But first, a quick Messenger fun fact:  Windows Live Messenger is available in 76 countries and 48 languages – Messenger users can say “I love you” not only in English, Spanish, German and Japanese (the initial 4 languages that Messenger was released in) but also Chinese, Estonian, Thai, Catalan, Hindi and many more.

How many languages can you say ‘I love you’ in?  Try it out… I could only get to 5… :)

Tips on how to propose via Windows Live Messenger

(Sent in by Mr. Zhang in China)

A few days ago a coworker of mine successfully proposed to his girlfriend via his Windows Live status message. It caused such a commotion around here that everyone and their dog knew. For those of you who are still digging around in your brains for a creative proposing strategy, let me share with you his little success story.  Let’s start off from the beginning. One regular afternoon at work, he suddenly changed his Windows Live Messenger status message to: “Today I am proposing. Everyone, please help me send a text at 19:00 that says: XiaXue, please marry Liu YunShan!” At first we thought he was just playing around, but he told us he was being serious!

So for the whole day, he kept signing in and out, in and out. It was impossible for anyone who was on Messenger with a pair of eyes to not see his message. It immediately became the hottest topic on Messenger as everyone became interested in helping him out.

Right after work, we all found a good place near the main entrance to hide and watch “the show.” I even borrowed our company’s video camera to record that special moment. As planned, the lucky lady appeared at around 6pm. Completely clueless, she walked into our building as we bombarded her with our paparazzi-like photography skills. Before she knew it, he appeared right there in front of her, down on one knee. In his hand was a bouquet of 99 fresh red roses. At that moment, everyone in the entire building melted.

Just when she thought things were over, her cell phone began to ring. One ring after another, the Messenger proposal volunteers’ messages all came flooding into her cell phone. OMG, it must have lasted for at least 5 minutes. She burst into tears as she read the proposal messages:

“Speaking on behalf of the entire company, I strongly ask that you marry XiaoShan! He has been nominated as the best employee for years! With him, at least your stomach will always be filled!”

“XiaoXue, please take good care of XiaoShan”

“XiaoXue, marry XiaoShan! He is mature, stable, career-driven, has a house, almost has a car… Wait, this is what I’m looking for in a husband! PS: he has sexy legs :) Marry him!”

“Sister in-law, please pay mercy to XiaoShan, he has been singing Single Love Song every day, we’re all about to explode. If he sings that again, beat him up! Hehe, wish you guys the best!”

“Beautiful XiaoXue, marry XiaoShan!”

“XiaoXue, marry the beasty XiaoShan!” …

So touching! *sniff*

The proposal strategy was successful: the couple went and registered the next day.

One of my friends heard about this success story and decided to follow suit. He, however, did not ask for help. He just went ahead and proposed to his girlfriend in his status message:

“My dearest Lan, here are 999 roses, please be my beautiful bride, will you marry me?”

After crying her eyes out, Lan agreed. Sure, it was pretty cheesy, but a few days later they registered too. We must admit that this strategy works, and it works pretty darn well.

From these two experiences, I have derived a few key points that I would like to share with all the clueless men out there.

1. When proposing, if you are asking for help (XiaoShan’s case), make sure your words are succinct. This will attract more eyeballs and thus increase your success rate. If you are proposing in your status message (Lan’s case), then you gotta be cheesy. Some cheese and corn will do it best. Below is my friend’s plan. Unfortunately, he has nobody to say it to. Notice how he used a lot of roses?
   
    
2. You must sign in and sign out at least once per minute! Make sure everyone in your list sees your message!
3. Choose your sign-in time wisely. Best time is during working hours when everyone is on Messenger. ; )

Thanks, and good luck!

(For this and other great stories about Windows Live Messenger, see the Messenger team blog)

(Updated July 9 and 10, 2009, to correct the number of languages and markets where Messenger is available, and to correct the name of the contributor of this story.) 

Comments policy
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It’s finally summer in Seattle, and baseball games when the roof on Safeco Field is open are the best. With Windows Live Calendar and subscriptions to a couple of online calendars, I can figure out when the Seattle Mariners are playing at home and what the weather forecast is. Then I’ll know when I should try to score some tickets.

Why subscribe instead of import calendars?

Well, there are a few differences between subscribing and importing:

• If you subscribe to an online calendar, whenever the third-party calendar is updated, your calendar is updated as well. This is great for calendars on the web, like sports schedules. To subscribe to an online calendar, all you need to know is the URL for the calendar and then paste it into Windows Live Calendar.
• If you import an online calendar, you don’t get calendar updates, you get a copy or “snapshot” of the calendar. This is great for uploading calendars from a computer, like migrating from an old calendar to Windows Live Calendar. To import a calendar, you need to save the .ics file to your computer and then import it into Windows Live Calendar.

After a little web searching on Bing, I found the two calendars that I need: the Mariner’s home game schedule for 2009, and the weekly Seattle weather forecast.

To subscribe to an online calendar:

1. Go to Windows Live Calendar and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. Click Subscribe at the top of the web page.
3. In the Calendar URL box, paste the URL for the online calendar, name the calendar, change the color (if you want), and click Subscribe to calendar.

Subscribing to the Mariner’s home game schedule

Windows Live Calendar lets you know that your subscription was added. Just click Done to see your calendars. And if the events don't show up on your calendar right away, check back because it will be updated shortly.

And now, just repeat for the Seattle weather calendar.

Voila, the Seattle weather forecast is there, too

Darn, no home games this week. I guess I’ll just have to keep checking my Windows Live Calendar.

Dawn Hollingsworth, CrackerJack fan
- Windows Live team

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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As we mentioned last week, Windows Live Messenger is turning 10 very soon and as part of our celebration, we will be sharing, here on our blog, different stories from our users, tips/tricks and fun facts, leading up to big day, July 22nd 2009.  We’ll also have special guest posts from people that work on Messenger and from around the community.  It’s going to be a great month so stay tuned.

Today’s Fun Factoid

If Windows Live Messenger was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world (behind China and India, and before the United States) and almost 10 times the size of Canada.

Today’s Messenger user story

Thanks everyone for the stories.  We’ve gotten an overwhelming number of funny, touching and odd stories and there is still time to submit one.  If you want to share your story and let others participate in your special moment with Messenger, please send your short story in English to IloveMessenger@live.com by June 28th.

Our first story comes from Clem from Canada.

“I had just met a really cute girl and we started exchanging IMs on Windows Live Messenger.  Even though we were on IM, I was still pretty nervous (yes, lame i know) but of course, tried to keep it cool.  Things seemed like they were going pretty well and we chatted for a little while until she said she had to go, to work on a finance homework problem that she was stuck on.  Being the helpful guy that I am, I offered to help… (limited finance knowledge, but hey, I had to try).  She sent me the problem over IM and I was in luck, a good friend of mine, Jon, was online.  He’d know the answer.  Quickly, I drafted the IM…

“Yo Jon, I’m trying hard to impress this really cute girl I just met, do you have a moment to help me figure out the answer to a finance problem so I can send it on to her.  You need to help me out, she is so hot!”

…then hit send.  It would probably take him a moment to respond, so I went back to the conversation with the girl… I read the last message and saw my message to Jon posted there… oh I guess I hadn’t switched windows, so I doubled checked… and that’s when I realized that I had posted that message to HER instead of Jon by accident.  My jaw hit the ground and stomach fell out.  I can’t really explain how embarrassed I was, and although I didn’t look in the mirror, I could feel my face heat up and I’m sure I was glowing with embarrassment like a tomato…

I didn’t know what to do… I wished you guys had built in an ‘undo’ at that point. :)  All I saw from her end was ‘Jen is typing’… but no message… then ‘Jen is typing’ but no words… that went on for about 4-5 minutes, then finally, she said something like “I have to go to bed, bye” and went offline.

We actually ended up becoming friends but nothing beyond that.  We never mentioned that ‘incident’, but my friends still get a good kick out of telling the story to people (yes, I have great friends) ;).  Anyways, I hope you enjoyed that and keep up the great work.”

I actually LOL’ed when I read that the first time.  Thanks for sharing Clem.  I bet many of us have done something similar. :)

Tip/Trick – Create your own custom emoticon

Did you know you can make your own emoticons from your own photos/images?  This has been around for a little while and is a nice way to be creative and have some fun in Messenger.  Here’s how.

	Step 1 – Click the Show menu button Step 2 – Click Tools Step 3 – Click Emoticons Now the Emoticon window will pop up.
	Step 4 – Click Create. Step 5 – Pick a photo/image to use. Note: It can be a bmp, jpg, png or even an animated gif. Step 6 – Type the keys that you want to use to bring up the emoticon.  In this case I’ve picked “woof” because it’s a picture of my dog.  Note: You can pick any keys you’d like. Just make sure it’s not something you type too often or it will keep appearing in your sentences. :) When you are done hit OK.
	Step 7 – Now scroll down to see your “Custom emoticons.” Step 8 – Your emoticon now shows up and you can use it.
	I open a chat with Dharmesh, since he loves dogs, and I send him the emoticon just by typing “woof.”  Once it shows up in his conversation window, he can right-click and add it to his collection. Have fun!

Thanks for reading.

- The Windows Live Messenger team

(Republished from the Windows Live Messenger blog)

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Doesn’t it seem like Twitter is officially “the thing” now?  Maybe that happened when Oprah joined Twitter. I’m not sure, but it certainly seems like it’s here to stay.

The Windows Live team has been tweeting away from http://twitter.com/windowslive for a few months now, and would welcome each and every one of you to follow us there. We tweet out news and information that hopefully will help you get even more out of Windows Live. Sometimes we take informal polls and ask questions to see what’s on your mind. And unlike some corporate Twitterers, there’s some give and take to our twitter stream--we don’t just blast stuff out. We try to follow those who follow us, and to respond to as many direct messages (“DMs” in twitterspeak) and @replies as we can, too.

Thanks to the Twitter web activity, you can also see our latest tweets under “What’s new” on the Windows Live team profile page.

So, who’s tweeting on behalf of @windowslive? You’ll see that our tweets often end with two letters preceded by a caret (“^”) symbol.  If you go to our twitter profile page, you’ll see those correspond to the initials of the real people tweeting on behalf of @windowslive. For example, I’m ^MS (Marcus Schmidt). We use a web application called CoTweet to manage all of that, which you can read more about in another guest blog post I did recently.

What would you like us to tweet about on @windowslive?  Please just leave a comment here, or better yet, send a tweet to @windowslive.

See you in the twittersphere,

Marcus Schmidt
Windows Community Manager

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One of the most common reasons people send e-mail today is to share photos. But photos can be really large files. When you attach several photos to an e-mail, their combined file size can really add up, making sending and receiving e-mail slow, especially if you or some of the people you’re sending them to have a slower or unreliable Internet connection. And if you exceed your attachment size limit, you’re completely out of luck!

Fortunately, if you use Windows Live Mail (free to download here), you can easily get around this problem with the photo e-mail feature, which lets you upload the full-size photos you want to share online, and attaches smaller, thumbnail-sized versions to your e-mail, making the download size of your message much smaller. The photo e-mail contains a link for recipients to view your photos as an online slide show. And after watching the slideshow, they can then download the full-size photos they like best.

Although the photo e-mail feature has been around for several years already in Mail, we made a few recent changes to the online slide show to make it even better. We took away a lot of the dead space in the old slide show, allowing for a larger viewing area, a much cleaner presentation, and the same beautiful effects you see in all our slide shows on Windows Live Photos. The new slide show uses Microsoft Silverlight technology to match the background color to your image, so it always appears in the best light.

Take a look (click to view larger images): 

Before:	After:

Much nicer, huh?

Hope you enjoy the updates!

Tanja
Program Manager, Windows Live Mail

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I love it when my friends “liveblog” so I get on-the-spot updates from them. What’s liveblogging? It’s sending out updates about what you’re doing, as you’re doing it. Twitter is a popular way to liveblog from anywhere (and you can add Twitter to your Windows Live profile if you like). But it’s also liveblogging when my friend posts photos and comments on their space about the latest sold-out blockbuster or video-game launch while still standing in line. Or when another friend posts videos of their newborn baby to SkyDrive before they even leave the hospital. Whatever and however they publish their news, I can see it as it happens in the What’s new list because I’m in their network on Windows Live. Getting this kind of immediate information lets me feel involved with their lives even when I’m busy with my own hectic schedule and can’t sit down and look at their latest pictures over coffee.

I wanted to liveblog to my friends from Windows Live too. I know it’s crazy, but people want to know what I’ve been up to just as much as I want to know what’s up with them! Go figure! I found out it’s really easy to publish new blog entries on Windows Live with the Spaces e-mail publishing option.

With e-mail publishing, my Windows Live space has a secret e-mail address. When I want to post to my blog, I just compose an e-mail of my blog post, including pictures, and then send it to the secret e-mail address using the e-mail program on my mobile phone!

I’ve also created secret e-mail addresses for my photo albums on Windows Live. With these e-mail addresses set up and turned on, everything I send to the shared photo albums stored on SkyDrive also appears in “What’s new with Sylvia” on my profile, and the people I choose see it in “What’s new with your network.”

Before you hit the road all ready to liveblog too, you'll need to turn on e-mail publishing for your space:

1. Browse to Windows Live Spaces at http://spaces.live.com and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. Click Customize your space, click Options, and then click E-mail publishing.
3. Select the check box for Turn on e-mail publishing.
4. Enter up to three e-mail addresses that you want to use to post to your blog. This is a safeguard to ensure that nobody else can post to your blog, even if your “secret e-mail address” for e-mail publishing falls into the wrong hands. But if you have a work e-mail address and a home address, and you want to be able to post from either one, you can enter both of those e-mail addresses here.
5. Choose a secret word. This is a password, another way to make sure that only you can post to your blog.
6. If you want, you can also choose photo albums to publish to. Each album will have its own e-mail address so you can e-mail photos right to that album from your phone or PC.
7. If you want to review your post before it’s published, under “Select your blog publishing option,” choose Save entries as draft. If you’re feeling lucky, choose Publish entries immediately.
8. Save your changes, and be sure to save these hard-to-remember e-mail addresses to your Hotmail contacts with an easy-to-remember name like My Blog or My Vacation Photos.

Now that you have e-mail publishing turned on, whenever you want to post to your blog, you just write an e-mail, and send it to your space's secret e-mail address.

If you chose to publish entries immediately, you should see your post right away on your blog and in “What’s new” on your profile page. If you chose to save your entries as drafts, you'll need to sign in to your space and publish the entries before they’re posted.

Happy liveblogging!

- Sylvia
   Writer, Windows Live team

Howdy, I’m Ian Tien, part of the Windows Live product management team here in sunny Redmond, Washington, USA.

Ever wanted to share a picture straight from your mobile phone? Without having to enter a bunch of e-mail address and without needing any cables or even a PC?

I have.

I take pictures from my phone all the time, and I LOVE getting them on the web in a snap.

One time, the fire alarm went off in the Microsoft building where I work and we stopped all the very important things we were doing—like blogging about our mother-in-laws and flexing atop mountains—and went outside to watch half a dozen fire trucks come to save us.

Fire trucks at my building—thank you City of Redmond! Turned out a ventilation fan overheated and set off the alarms.

Another time, I went over to the cafeteria of the Microsoft Surface team to demo Windows Live as part of Windows 7 and I made a totally awesome poster:

Picture of my poster for my demo in the Microsoft Surface cafeteria.

Then there was the time my buddy Lonn organized a curling trip for the whole Windows Live product management team at the Granite Curling Club in Seattle. Fun times :)   

Windows Live product managers curling in Seattle. Despite some close calls, no one was seriously injured.

And then there are days like today, where it’s just a wonderful afternoon and I want to take a picture from the window outside my office:

View from window outside my office. In the distance are the Cascade mountains.

After taking each of these pictures with my mobile phone, it’s just a couple of clicks to send them to Windows Live where they are easily displayed, shared, downloaded, and even printed as I choose.

Ready to try it out?

Here’s how:

1. Sign in to Windows Live (or get an account if you don’t have one).
2. Go to home.live.com.
3. Click Options, click More Options, and then click E-mail Publishing.
4. Follow the instructions to set up e-mail publishing.

From then on, publishing your photos and comments online is as easy as sending mail. Many phones can be set up to do this in just a couple of clicks, so check out the menus on your mobile phone for more info.

All this works with my trusty T-Mobile Shadow phone running Windows Mobile. But it also works from BlackBerry devices, MacBooks, and iPhones—or any device that can e-mail photos!

The album (on photos.live.com) where I send my mobile photos by default.

Snazzy slide show of my mobile photos with a frame color that automatically complements each photo.

My friends and I can download all my mobile photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery to organize, edit, and manage them.

Windows Live Writer, the program I use to create blog posts (like this one!) incorporating mobile photos I’ve previously shared. Writer is great because it lets you easily play with photo borders.

By sharing my mobile photos on Windows Live, my friends see what I’m up to, I tell stories with pictures, plus if—heaven forbid—something happens to my phone, I have copies of all my “digital memories” on Windows Live.

Okay, now the big question: How many photos can I share?

Well… Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of photos and my phone takes pictures that are about 0.5 MB in size. So that’s about 50,000 photos. If I share one mobile photo a day—every single day—that’s…

enough space for 137 years worth of daily photos.

That’s a lot of FREE space for your stuff!

Get it free on the one and only WINDOWS LIVE!

…best enjoyed responsibly,

- Ian Tien

Windows Live Product Management Team

Last week members of one of my favorite bands, Soundgarden, played a surprise set at a benefit show. I wanted to share my good fortune with my friends, and let people know how much I love this band, so I added them to “Favorite things” on my profile page.

A few of the bands, books, and movies that I love

I clicked the favorite thing I wanted to add (Music), and typed in the band’s name. Then I clicked Search to find an image of the band, and wrote a short comment about why I love them. This was my chance to let the world know (or just my buddies—you can set the permissions for favorite things as open or as private as you want) that I’d just seen them play a show at a local club. Unreal!

 
After I added them, the image and what I wrote about them showed up in my favorite things. “Of course!” you say. What’s even better is that it got sent out to all the people in my network, who get my “what’s new” updates. “Of course!” you say again. I know. But what’s even better than that is that there’s a little heart icon that appears for everyone else. If they love this band as much as I do—or even if they just like them—they can click the heart to add it to their own favorite things. Pretty sweet.

My love for the band gets sent out to everyone in my network

So...have you read a good book recently? Seen an awesome movie that everyone should know about? How about that band that you still listen to—and just saw again—after all of these years?

Add them to your favorite things, and let people dig a little deeper into who and what shaped you, and what you’re into right now. It’s an easy way to share the things you love most.

*Updated (April 24, 2009): Currently, image search in favorite things is only available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Germany.

- Todd Colfelt
  The Windows Live team

UPDATE April 22, 2009:  Good news! These favorites features are now available everywhere SkyDrive is.*

If you made me—but please don't make me—pick the one aspect of Windows Live I get the most excited about with the least amount of prompting, it's what Windows Live can do with your Internet Explorer favorites. While I advocate on behalf of them, I will try to keep my enthusiasm to a dull roar, because a showy display is not The Favorites Way. To the contrary, this aspect of Windows Live is so low-key that you might never have noticed it, or you might have poked it a few times after installing Windows Live Toolbar, found it didn't do anything flashy, and forgotten all about it.

Are you social? Broadcast and share your faves

There are a few sites I return to again and again that my pals would also be interested in. Rather than send Yet Another E-mail with Yet Another Hyperlink That They Will Lose, I add them to my shared favorites using the Share button on Windows Live Toolbar.

I click the Share button to add a new shared favorite

If my pals happen to be paying attention to what's new, they'll notice that I've shared a couple of favorites recently.

My network sees that I shared some favorites

If they aren't paying attention, they can still see what I've shared anytime in my Shared favorites folder on SkyDrive.

The people in my network can see my Shared favorites on SkyDrive

You automatically have two favorites folders on SkyDrive already: Shared favorites (which is shared with your network by default) and Favorites (which is for your own eyes only). If I set up Toolbar to sync my favorites , all of my personal favorites are on my SkyDrive, all the time, in my personal Favorites folder. This comes in handy when I use a public or shared computer. So let's talk about setting up your favorites to sync.

Got better things to do than compulsively organize your web links? Favorites sync has your back.

I love, love, love favorites sync on Windows Live Toolbar because I love, love, love collecting favorites and then completely ignoring them. All I want is for them to be exactly the same on every computer I use, all the time, without me having to organize them more than once. Is that too much to ask? Toolbar says nope, it's not.

It's just a matter of getting this set up to do it automagically. If you haven't set up favorites sync yet, you'll see a Favorites Sync icon on Windows Live Toolbar.

Click the icon to start the wizard to set up sync

Just click this icon and follow the steps shown on the screen to get everything set up. Do this on each computer where you use Internet Explorer (and sign in with the same Windows Live ID), and those favorites will always be the same.

If you have lots and lots of favorites, the first time you sync it may take a few hours for all of them to sync up. After that, they’ll sync every 90 minutes, or every time you change your favorites in Internet Explorer.

If you've set sync up once, that icon goes away. If you set up sync, turn it off, and want to turn it back on, right-click the toolbar, and then click Toolbar Options.

Right-click Windows Live Toolbar to check or change your sync settings

When the Options window appears, click Sync your favorites and see what you get. If you see a button that says Start Automatic Sync, that means you—accidentally, I'm sure—turned sync off and need to turn it on again by clicking the button. If the button says Stop Automatic Sync, that means sync is on. Leave everything alone.

Click the button to start sync again. Do it now! Hurry!

You can start and stop sync anytime, but why would you want to? Having your favorites sync automatically keeps them occupied and frees up your obsessive-compulsive organizing time for something Windows Live can't help you with, like endlessly refolding and restacking your T-shirt collection by color, fiber, state of wear, person you were dating during purchase … or is that just me?

- Lisa Andrews, OCD editor, Windows Live team

* Those places are: Arabia, South Arabia, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United States, United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

I don’t know about you, but remembering birthdays has always been tough for me. And now being 7+ states away from my family, it’s even tougher. Mom’s not around to drop those little hints about [Dad/Sister/Uncle/Grandmother/Niece]’s upcoming birthday into everyday conversation. With the Birthday Calendar in Windows Live Calendar, I don’t need to worry about forgetting another birthday. And with event reminders, I even have enough time to find that perfect gift (or find out from Mom what the perfect gift is) and get it in the mail.

See birthday events when the Birthday Calendar is selected

So how do birthdays magically appear in calendar? Birthday events are included in the Birthday Calendar for:

• Your network (profile and Messenger) contacts, or at least the ones sharing their birthday info with you.
• Your “regular” contacts (contacts on your People page that aren’t network contacts) if you’ve added their birth dates to their contact details.

It takes a little while for birth dates that you add to your ‘regular’ contact’s details to appear on the Birthday calendar. Browse the web, think about a great gift, check your calendar after a few hours, it should be there.

Add reminders

Reminders are sent 12 hours before a birthday event by default. But if you’re like me, you may need a little extra lead time. Luckily, reminders can be set anywhere from 2 weeks before, to no reminder at all for each birthday event. Since the birthday event is set for a day, not a particular time during the day, the event “occurs” at the beginning of each day, or 12am. If you leave the default reminder of 12 hours, then you’ll get the reminder around noon the day before a person’s birthday. To change the reminder, open a birthday event and select an option in the Send reminder list.

I need to get this reminder as soon as possible

Select reminder delivery options

You can also choose how you get reminders: in Windows Live Messenger “toasts”, e-mail messages, text messages on your mobile phone, or any combo of the three. Before you start spamming yourself with event reminders, it’s important to know that your reminder delivery options apply to all of your calendars, not to specific calendars or individual events. So while it may be great to get reminders about someone’s special day sent to you everywhere, realize that you’re going to get reminders for all your other events as well.

To change where your reminders are delivered to:

1. On the Options menu, click More options.
2. Under Set your reminder time, click Change how you get reminders.
3. On the Windows Live Calendar alerts page, click the Basic Delivery tab and choose one or more options.
   -or-
   If you want your change your reminder delivery based on your Messenger status, click the Custom Delivery tab.
   To receive reminders in a text message, you may need to set up SMS for Windows Live. Click Set up an MSN Mobile account to start. (Sometimes the web moves faster than we do—we’re working on updating this page to match our latest release.)

So with a little updating of your contact details and maybe changing some reminders, you’ll never forget another birthday too! OK, now I have to IM my Mom and find out what I should buy. I hope it’s something I can buy online—I don’t I have time to go to the post office.

-Dawn Hollingsworth

The Windows Live Team

Update: Unfortunately, Windows Live Calendar is experiencing some unexpected issues with birthday calendars and calendar subscriptions. Some users are unable to view or update the Birthday Calendar. And some users with calendar subscriptions have reported problems with missing data or delayed updates.

The Windows Live Calendar team is working hard to resolve these issues as soon as possible.  We apologize for any inconvenience. (March 24, 2009)

Update 2: The subscriptions issue has been resolved. (March 25, 2009)

Update 3: The birthday calendar issue has been resolved.  We’re sorry for the interruption and any inconvenience it might have caused. For some users, after you sign in, it might take up to 4 hours to see your updates to the Birthday calendar. (May 7, 2009)

My family and I recently traveled from Sammamish, Washington to Thailand for a winter vacation, and it really struck me how much things have changed in the last few years with regards to technology.

For one thing, I didn’t need to spend time looking for Internet cafes on this trip, because Wi-Fi was everywhere—in cafes and hotels especially. On the other hand, it wasn’t available in the apartment where we were staying, so I was often in need of tools I could use both offline and online. The solution that worked for me and my family? Windows Live.

Full disclosure: I do work for Microsoft, but not on anything related to Windows Live, so many of the features of Windows Live were as new to me as to any of you out there. I was pleasantly surprised by how incredibly helpful it was to have Windows Live along on this trip.

Here are a few highlights of how Windows Live worked to help us stay in touch while we traveled.

• Windows Live Mail

  The web is great, but Wi-Fi connections aren’t always available, and they sometimes cut out at inopportune moments. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to download your mail while you have a good connection, and then read it later. With Windows Live Mail on my laptop (a free downloadable program; part of Windows Live Essentials), whenever I found a Wi-Fi network to connect to, I’d open Windows Live Mail, click the Sync button (note: this used to be called Send/receive), and it downloaded all my mail while I worked on other things. I could then read my mail later back at our rental apartment where we didn’t have any Wi-Fi.
  Another advantage to Windows Live Mail is that we could download mail from all our e-mail accounts at once, instead of having to go to several different e-mail websites. Great on vacation when you’d rather be out snorkeling than waiting around for various webpages to load.

• Windows Live Photo Gallery

  We could work offline to upload all our pictures from the camera, tag the pictures, add captions, and then, when we had a Wi-Fi connection, I selected the photos I wanted to post online, and published them as a photo album up on Windows Live Photos. Our friends and family (anyone we gave permission to view the albums), got to see our photos even before we came back from vacation.

• Windows Live Writer

  This is another great product to help you work offline, in this case, for blogging and publishing  photos. With Writer, I was able to write all my blog posts offline, and take time to have my wife review them, and to consult our travel books for the correct names of all the sites we’d visited. Once we connected to Wi-Fi, I just clicked Publish. By the way, Writer allows you to publish to almost any blog service you use, not just Windows Live Spaces.
  Writer also allowed me to easily include maps of where we were traveling, and helped me arrange a series of thumbnails of the pictures I’d published earlier, so I could link to them from my blog.

• Windows Live Spaces

  We use Spaces as a family website where all our pictures are available, along with our blog posts. Our extended family has it bookmarked and visits regularly to get all our latest updates and photos.

• Windows Live Profile

  “What’s new with Kevin” on my profile page allowed my friends to keep up with all my new blog posts, pictures, and Twitter updates as they happened. They only see an update under “What’s new with Kevin” if they have permission to view the content that it refers to. For example, my blog posts are public, so all of those updates appear to anyone who visits my profile, but I shared my photo albums with family and friends only, so people I don’t know don’t see any updates about my photos.

• Twitter and Facebook

  These aren’t Windows Live products, of course, but they do work with Windows Live. Since so many of our friends use these services, their compatibility with Windows Live made it easy for more people to follow along on our adventures.  I used a Windows Live Writer extension called Twitter Notify to send an automatic update to Twitter every time I published a new blog post. I also set up Twitter to update Facebook, and added Twitter as a web activity on Windows Live so that my tweets appeared in my Windows Live “What’s new” list, too.
  Soon you’ll also be able to add Facebook as a web activity on Windows Live. Either way, every time I add a blog entry, my friends on Windows Live, Twitter, and Facebook are all updated. No need to update in more than one place!

It was great to be able to stay so connected during our family vacation. I hope you enjoy trying out a few of these features yourself. Have you used Windows Live to stay in touch with friends when you’re out of town? Leave a comment and let us all know how else you’ve used Windows Live.

Happy travels!

- Kevin Bartholomae
  Microsoft