Microsoft Windows Live Beta

Awaiting you at the Windows Live Beta main page (www.live.com) is a clean and inviting interface.

Keep your expectations in check; I don't think the folks at Microsoft meant this statement to be taken literally.

Keep as much or as little as you'd like. It's worth playing around with this bar at first (and you can eventually make it disappear all together. Unchecking everything on the right leaves you with just a search bar. One of the key premises I took away from the Microsoft mission with Live is customization. Call it imitation if you'd like (Google/IG and Google Desktop were out with similar customization features before Live), but it is pleasant and flexible.

Once you sign in these various services show up by default under the big blue bar (more are sure to be added). Clicking on one of the folder icons opens up a sub-window below. You then in turn have the option of adding that particular feature to your customized page, whereby it will then appear every time you sign in.

Clicking on the Gadget Gallery icon opens up the sub window listing the passel of gadgets you already have a choice of adding to your Live.com page. Note the "add to live" hypertext at the end of the Gadget Gallery window?s top bar.

While in the Gadget Gallery you can click on each gadget's icon and it appears with a description, in this case the NASA Image of the Day gadget. Note the user rating stars and the green "add gadget" plus sign.

New control mechanisms like these scroll bars are much hyped and prominent on the Live.com pages. I'm not convinced of their utility as yet, for instance with some of them your results are aggregated into one very long page. In these circumstances if you have a very large number of results they make for slow scrolling and you can virtually never get to the bottom of the page. While they worked well when using a mouse, I found the rather cumbersome to use with a laptop's pointer stick and scroll pad.

I really liked the way image search results were displayed. The thumbnails and the added information included with them are helpful.

Clicking on an image's URL or the thumbnail image itself from the image search results thumbnail page takes you to a preview of the site it comes from. The rest of the page surrounding the image is made transparent. Other results from your search move over to the left side of the page in this view and remain accessible. One of the new scroll mechanisms sits atop them allowing you to determine just how many or how few are displayed down the side.

One of the many useful things available from the Windows Live Beta page is a new toolbar. There are many components to choose from.

One unexpected hiccup I hit during my install of the toolbar was the required installation of the .NET Framework to support the various Web page clipping features Microsoft is integrating from the acquisition of Web dev company Onfolio's assets. I chose to complete the install without it and pursue remedy number 2.

The Windows Live Toolbar Options page can assist you in downloading and installing other buttons/tools. In this case we wanted to complete installation of the Onfolio toolset.

Clicking on the download and install link here circled us back around to the same error message we'd encountered before. Leaving us just remedy option number 1; certainly not a deal breaker for an otherwise very handy and free toolbar, but something that might trip up the uninitiated novice end user.

This one's self-explanatory.