I caught this bit of news tonight from Redmond Pie’s awesome Web Slice for IE8 Beta 2 which shows their latest headlines: Microsoft Live Labs has released a really neat Color Picker Gadget for Windows Sidebar.

Download: Color Picker Gadget from Microsoft Live Labs

Essentially the Color Picker Gadget gives users quick access to RGB color hex codes. This could be extremely handy when working with several apps or doing website development and you’re needing to utilize a palette across the board. This Gadget allows you to create and save your own color palettes and search palettes from the website COLOURlovers. This was a side project of Live Labs Designer Jeff Weir. For more information, check out this post on the Microsoft Live Labs Blog.

Today, Microsoft Live Labs has announced the worldwide availability of Photosynth where users can create their own Photosynth collections - or "Synths" - for free. Previously, Photosynth was only available as a Technology Preview without the ability to create your own Synths.

To start using Photosynth yourself, just head on over to the new Photosynth website and login with your Windows Live ID and create a Photosynth ID. This Photosynth ID will be tied to whatever Synths you create.  Depending on the number of photos in your Synth, it could take anywhere between 2 to 30 or more minutes to create and upload. When you create a Synth, you can give your Synth a name, description and even assign it some tags. Everyone is given a quote of 20GB for their Synths.

To view and create Synths, a 7MB plug-in must be installed first from either Internet Explorer (6 or 7) or Mozilla Firefox (2 or 3).

The Photosynth plug-in does all of the processing - or "synthing" - of your photos prior to uploading the results to the Photosynth website.  

The installation of this plug-in also puts a

...

On Friday, a new build of Deep Zoom Composer was released sporting some really neat new functionality including the ability to upload collections to Microsoft Live Labs PhotoZoom.

Download: Deep Zoom Composer (8/1/2008 Release)

Microsoft Live Labs PhotoZoom is designed to let users show off their photos with Deep Zoom and Silverlight by allowing users to upload their Deep Zoom collections to the web. To upload my collection, all I needed to do was login using my Windows Live ID in Deep Zoom Composer under "PhotoZoom Export".

NOTE: Before you are able to upload a collection, you must first go to the Microsoft Live Labs PhotoZoom website and login to create an account associated with your Windows Live ID.

Once signed in, I can create a new album, give it an album name, choose image format and quality and upload. I can also add to existing collections.  

After I published a collection to PhotoZoom - I can embed that collection into a website or blog post to share the collection with others. Here is my first "test" Deep Zoom collection on PhotoZoom. It's a panoramic shot I stitched together

...