As promised, the public betas of the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications are now available for download. Go to http://download.live.com/ and get the newest Messenger, Mail,Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety.
So far I’ve only tested Windows Live Messenger, generally I like the new look. I love the "Favorites List" feature, since I already had a favorites group in previous versions of Windows Live Messenger. Another feature that may become useful: creating groups of users as a single contact. This way in a single click you can begin a conversation with multiple contacts, almost like a mailing list or a chat room channel.
Something I would like to change is the size of the avatars in the conversation window. It is pretty cool that now you can get a minimalistic conversation window if you hide the toolbar in the top and the avatars.
Make sure you restart your operating system after installing, because I was getting some strange window behavior previous to that. One feature that is a "little" buggy is the theme customization. You can try to change your windows color to black, but even if you set it as your default color, after restarting Windows Live Messenger it will be reset to the default blue, even the main window will get the default color…
Next step: keep on testing and try the other applications also.
