InsideMicrosoft

Windows Live For TV First Impressions

LiveSide showed off today Windows Live for TV (also known as orbit, previously known as Nemo), an application that lets you browse Windows Live Spaces, have real-time conversations with your Windows Live Messenger buddies, and call landlines with Verizon Web Calling, all using Windows Vista Media Center’s 10-foot interface.

There’s a blog by the Orbit team that includes a bunch of info and screenshots (distributed throughout this post, LiveSide has two cool screenshots as well). The beta waitlist is now open, so get in line and hope you get picked.

Oh, no need for waiting :-). Someone posted the download link in LiveSide’s comments, and here it is:

http://mtview.live.com/orbit/setup/orbit.msi

The download is a mere 600k+, and ran fine for me on Vista RC1. I’m told it won’t run on x64 systems, like the Ferrari laptops Microsoft recently sent out.

Live for TV is built in WPF and requires a version of Windows Vista that has Media Center. That means it won’t run on XP, and it won’t run on Vista Home Basic or Vista Business. While there is a mention in the Orbit blog about it running in IE7 on Vista, it looks like they don’t support it running in those editions.

Orbit is optimized for the Media Center remote, so you don’t need a keyboard, but a keyboard will still be useful if available (like for text chat).

So, first impressions?

The Messenger and Call applications don’t work, leaving you with a “Coming Soon” screen. You can instant message, but it involves finding the person in the Spaces application, and you can call them from there as well.

While Live4TV is graphically really cool, performance is bad. It’s still code-in-progress, so don’t be mad, but it has a ways to go before I would let Bill Gates demo it at CES. Because of the lag, letters are missed while you type, and that can get very annoying. There’s no shift key support in the typing field, so you can’t quickly edit and erase portions.

Besides the performance issues, no complaints about the UI. It looks amazing, the animations are great, and if they get it to work well on a baseline Vista Premium Ready PC, this could be a serious Windows Live killer app.

First impression grade:

UI - A
Performance - D
Overall Grade - C+

I’ve done a screencast showing it off. Come back during the day and I’ll have it here, embedded and ready for everyone to share.

January 4th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Windows, General | 5 comments