I am so digging the new new Windows Live Sign-in Assistant. If you haven’t seen it, it provides easy signin for people w/ multiple Passports Windows Live IDs. I use Windows Live Custom Domains to manage my devhawk.net email (which also rocks) which means I have my personal hotmail ID as well as my devhawk email ID. With the sign-in assistant, I get a slick login UI that lets me log in with either ID with a single click. Very nice. So far, the new sign-in only seems to be enabled for Windows Live Ideas, but I assume that will expand over time.

BTW, if you want this new sign-in experience, it looks like you need the new beta of Windows Live Messenger. There’s a bunch of other new stuff in the latest beta - new features, better perf and a more polished experience. AFAIK, you still need to be invited to join the beta. I have a bunch of invites – if you want one, drop me a line.

I wrote last week about the need for a better first run expereince for the new Live Toolbar. I just went to install the toolbar on my dev partition and lo and behold, the first run experience is fixed! It now presents a list of installable components with the most popular ones preselected. Much better.

After installing the new Windows Live Toolbar, I installed some of the add-ins that I usually wouldn’t. Things like the Phishing Filter, Games and the Windows Live Favorites. I’m not sure when Live Favorites was refreshed, but the new version is much better. It support both folders and tags – previously it just supported folders. There’s a reason why tagging has taken off – it makes sense to people. I started using Live Favorites but gave up because the folder approach is so much less flexible.

The other new feature is that the Live Favorites Add-in now sync’s your local favorites with your Live Favorites. Not sure how that will work if you primarily use tags on Live Favorites, but I guess I’ll see.

Finally, Live Favorites can be shared, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to search shared favorites. Am I missing something?

Now that I’m back in the office with an external monitor, I’m able to use my laptop again. While I was waiting for the help desk tech to show up, I installed the new Live Toolbar. I was immediately thrown however, because it comes with basically no default installed features. It was strange to have to install basic features like tabbed browsing and desktop search. On the other hand, it was nice not to have the previously default features that I don’t use uninstalled (i.e. popup blocker, form fill, msn extensions). There needs to be a better first-run experience that presents the user a list of options to install (along with the standard ones pre-selected). Otherwise, so far so good.