Technogran's Tittle Tattle: Windows Live Wave 4

Of all the leaked screen grabs of the upcoming Windows Live Wave 4 updates posted on the Internet so far Windows Live Live Writer certainly seems to be the furthest ahead in terms of development judging by these pictures.

The screen grab above shows the Picture tab choices across the ribbon complete with all the obvious choices available to the user in easy to click on (and find!) icons which are really simple to understand for even the most novice user. These are divided into seperate areas across the ribbon as follows, Size, Rotate, Picture Styles, Properties, Settings, Alignment (complete with easy to understand icons of each picture position in relation to the text) and lastly Margins. (which I find that most Writer users don’t make enough use of.) Also note that the Set Category and Set Publish date are now placed just below the ribbon so the user isn’t constantly having to scroll down to the bottom of the edit/compose screen in order to access any feature. Good thinking team! Note also that the right hand side bar is now no longer needed as every choice and feature that it contained is now easily available via the ribbon interface thereby allowing the full width of the screen for a users blog post.

This next screen grab shows the Home tab on the ribbon. There does seem to be one area of this screen grab that I feel is not needed on the Home ribbon and that is the Insert area. The Home tab ribbon is divided into Clipboard, Publish, Font, Paragraph (which also contains tabs,numbering, quotes and align) HTML styles reminiscent of those found in the Word ribbon and which appears to work in a similar way, Insert which is not necessary in this Home ribbon seeing as it has its own tab and so is surplus to requirements in this part of the Ribbon Interface, and lastly Editing which contains the inbuilt spelling checker, word count, find and Select All. Note everyone that lovely wide area now available for your composing and editing! Brilliant!

Lastly a much closer view of the Insert tab ribbon showing everything that you can insert into your post. Firstly we have the all new singing and dancing Breaks consisting of Horizontal line (Hurrah!) Clear break and Split post followed by Tables, Media which naturally includes Hyperlink, Picture, Video, Photo Album, Map, Post Tags and some cool new Emoticons, and lastly Plug-ins containing Add a plug-in and Manage plug-ins. I just wish I had my mitts on it all!

My grateful thanks to LiveSino.net for these fantastic screen grabs which only serve to make me more excited about trying all of the new Wave 4 updates out myself.

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, Windows Live, Wave 4, Live Writer, ribbon, Insert, picture, home, tab, emoticon

We recently saw some leaked screen grabs of some new headers for the Windows Live site which apparently will be introduced in the new Wave 4 updates. Take a look at them all in the following picture. Most of them have been taken from the default Windows 7 themes. Trouble is I am not all that keen on any of them if I am honest.

So I thought it would be interesting (and also a bit of fun) to show you some of my headers that I would choose if I were allowed to be able to upload my own headers if the teams would grant us all that ability. (or it was possible to do.) Here they are.