Entries tagged with live mesh - Channel 10

Get The Live Mesh Wallpaper Pack

sarahintampa — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:03:00 GMT

Are you Mesh-obsessed? Well now you can show off your devotion to the new service by displaying the Mesh logo on your computer’s desktop. Thanks to the Live Dev team (and James, for posting the link), you can download a huge pack of Live Mesh themed wallpapers which offer several different variations on the Mesh Logo and colorful background. You don’t have to be a Mesh fanatic to enjoy these, though – the Mesh logo makes for a nice centerpiece on any desktop screen. You can grab the zip file for yourself from here.

PDC 2008 - Blockbuster usando Mesh e Azure

Galileu — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:18:00 GMT

Não sei como passou despercebido, talvez porque não apareceu nos keynotes do PDC, mas a Blockbuster estará lançando uma nova versão de seu serviço de aluguel online de vídeos (nos EUA) usando o Mesh e Azure. Em uma sessão realmente obrigatória para os desenvolvedores que querem entrar na onda do Live Services (o novo nome para a plataforma do Live Mesh), o funcionário da Microsoft mostra como a Blockbuster integrou o seu sistema de aluguel online de vídeos com o Live Services e Azure para aproveitar os recursos oferecidos pela nova plataforma. Os principais benefícios para a Blockbuster são:

Programa com interface rica graças ao Silverlight – Foi desenvolvido um programa muito bonito e funcional para a Blockbuster. O melhor é que por ser Silverlight ele foi desenvolvido uma só vez e rodará em Windows, Mac OSX, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari e até celulares Windows Mobile (Nokia em breve). Isso mesmo, o programa roda no desktop, na Web ou no celular. Veja por que no ponto abaixo.
Disponibilidade do serviço off-line – Por causa da sincronização permitida pelo Live Services, o catálogo de aluguel de filmes pode ser acessado off-line pelo usuário. Não só isso, mas todas as funcionalidades do aplicativo podem ser acessadas off-line, como comentários, votação, trailer de filmes, e a escolha do filme para alugar. Quando o usuário voltar a estar online essas informações são sincronizadas e o filme alugado começa a ser baixado.
Acesso a múltiplos dispositivos – Quem usa o Live Mesh sabe que ele conecta os seus diversos dispositivos e permite a sincronização de conteúdo entre eles. A Blockbuster está aproveitando esse recurso do Live Services para permitir que você assista o filme alugado em qualquer um de seus dispositivos. Você até pode alugar do celular e mandar o filme baixar no PC que está em casa.
Tornar o programa social/viral – O Live Services integra os contatos do Windows Live Messenger de um usuário. Dessa forma, eu posso assistir um filme nesse programa do Blockbuster e meus amigos sabem que eu estou vendo o filme. Ao mesmo tempo, eu posso indicar filmes para meus amigos porque eles fazem parte da minha rede Mesh e, portanto, estão automaticamente disponíveis no serviço da Blockbuster.

Bom, esse exemplo da Blockbuster é bacana porque reforça o exemplo do BBC iPlayer, só que entra em detalhes. De novo, se você é desenvolvedor esse vídeo é muito recomendado porque ele entra nos detalhes: segurança, autenticação, integração do back-end da Blockbuster com o Azure, e como tornar um site ou programa em algo social/viral e dar a ele capacidades online/off-line.

Meu grande amigo René, o Surfista Prateado (ele é o cara de Silverlight na MS-Brasil), não resistiu e fez uma dublagem dos melhores momentos dessa apresentação de 95 mins. Aproveitem!

A Mesh-Enabled Game, Dr. Popper

sarahintampa — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:01:00 GMT

After receiving some developer tokens at PDC, Bill Reiss has been playing around developing apps using the Live Services framework. One of his first applications is “Dr. Popper,” a Live Mesh-enabled Silverlight game which he’s tweaking to store high scores in the Mesh. He said it only took him a couple of hours to build, but it would have taken even less if he had the correct version of Mesh running on his desktop at the time. (He needed the Tech Preview version, not the release version).

Looks pretty cool, Bill. Now when can we play?

Vídeo – Veja o potencial do Live Mesh como plataforma através do BBC iPlayer

Galileu — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:44:00 GMT

O BBC iPlayer é um sucesso tremendo no Reino Unido, chegando a ser responsável por 10% de todo tráfego de Internet lá. Eles mostraram no PDC 2008 uma nova versão do iPlayer que utiliza o Live Services e dá destaque ao Live Mesh. Com o poder de sincronização do Mesh, é possível sempre ter acesso ao conteúdo em diversos dispositivos como mostra o vídeo. Não somente isso, pois o Mesh permite também a sincronização do exato ponto que o usuário parou de assistir algo em um notebook, por exemplo, e recomeça do mesmo ponto no celular. No vídeo, que está em horrível qualidade, é demonstrado o novo iPlayer feito em Silverlight que é instalado através do Live Mesh no PC e no Windows Mobile. Recomendo ver a versão em alta qualidade no site oficial do PDC 2008. Pra quem não entende inglês, publiquei essa versão com narração.

Clique aqui para ver o vídeo no Soapbox .

Windows Home Server + Live Mesh @ PDC2008

Nic — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The Windows Home Server team were at PDC2008 presenting sessions on developing WHS applications and services which are now available for on-demand viewing over at Channel 9.

We sat down with Mark Pendergrast, Brendan Grant and Doug Berrett to chat about their PDC sessions and how Live Mesh is being integrated with Windows Home Server including a prototype demo of WebGuide running as a Silverlight application from the Live Mesh desktop.

Session links: Exposing Connected Home Services to the Internet via Windows Home Server (ES12) & Developing Connected Home Applications and Services for Windows Home Server (ES11)

Live Mesh For Windows Mobile

sarahintampa — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:17:00 GMT

If you have a Windows Mobile 6.x phone and like either in the U.S. or U.K., then you can download and install the new Windows Live Mesh for Mobile client software, which is only being provided on a limited basis - meaning, first-come, first-serve. To access the downloadable file, visit http://m.mesh.com from your phone’s browser. If you had previously been running an older version of the Mesh Mobile Client, you’ll need to make sure that you upgrade to version number 0.9.3424.6 (You can check this through Menu -> About). If you need the upgraded client, the direct link is http://m.mesh.com/install/wm6/LiveMesh.cab. After installation, your phone becomes a member of your device ring, just like your desktop and laptop computers are, and you can then add mobile files to your mesh as well as access files from your other devices.

A Big Day For Live Mesh: Here’s What’s New

sarahintampa — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:22:00 GMT

The Live Mesh team is rolling out a big update to the service which is going to deliver new features to the PC version of Mesh. In addition, the first Mac and Windows Mobile clients are being released in technical previews (see details below). Current Mesh users will need to update their clients when prompted in order to still participate in Live Mesh. Mac users will need to check Mesh.com for invites. Like the first rollout, there will be a limited number available, so keep your eyes out!

Here’s what’s new in Live Mesh, courtesy of the Live Mesh team blog:

New features:

· New devices supported. We are delighted to release our client software for Mac OS X (10.5.1 or higher) and Windows Mobile (6.0 and 6.1). Because these are both significant new software investments for us, we’re going to only provide them on a limited basis for now (and mobile is restricted to only US or UK to start.) If you get a message saying that we’re at full capacity for these clients, keep an eye on the blog here. We’ll post updates as we increase availability over the coming months.

· To get access to the Mac client, sign in to www.mesh.com, click Add Device, and then click the “Limited Mac Tech Preview now available” link underneath the Install button. If we haven’t exceeded the limit for Mac clients, you’ll get a confirmation dialog, and then Mac will show up under the available list of devices when you choose Add Device from the ring.

· To get access to the Windows Mobile 6.x client, click on one of the following links (US residents, UK residents). Sign in with your LiveID, and you’ll be redirected to the device ring where you’ll see a link to “Use Live Mesh for mobile devices.” Alternately, once you’ve signed in this way, the mobile client should be available for download by pointing your phone’s browser to http://m.mesh.com

· Worldwide availability. We’ve removed the limits on what countries are able to sign up to use Live Mesh. We previously had limitations in place so that we could complete our testing with various language and locale settings, and now that work is indeed complete (with the caveat of course that for now the mobile client, as mentioned above, is not actually available worldwide).

· WAP access. Some of you already discovered that browsing http://m.mesh.com from your WAP-enabled phone gives you a lightweight way to view Mesh content (and, on phones that support it, upload new files.) We’re now making WAP an officially supported feature.

· Folder roles/permissions. Members of a folder can now be assigned one of the following roles to control their access rights: creator, owner, contributor, and reader. Previously, the only permission level (aka “role”) you could set for a member was “owner,” which meant that all members had the same control over the contents of a folder (adding, changing, deleting) as you did. Now, you can assign specific permissions for each member in a Live Mesh folder. Want members to be able to read what’s in a folder, but not change any content? Make them readers. Want them to be able to add to the folder, but not invite other users? Make them contributors.

· Automatic update is now available for the Live Mesh software. This has been a common user request, and we’re taking a first step towards making it possible for your Mesh client software to update itself automatically, without you having to click on any links. In this Beta release, automatic update works like magic if you chose not to install the extra enhancements that required administrator rights. If you did install them, we still have to prompt you to update so that you can click through the UAC elevation prompt and give us permission to update administrative components. We will continue to work on streamlining this process for you in future releases.

· P2P sync can be managed from your computer. When we first enabled P2P sync, you had to go to the Live Desktop to change the sync settings for a folder so that it would no longer synchronize with your Live Desktop and eat up your 5 GB storage limit. We heard from many customers that this was not very intuitive (and we agree: it wasn’t). Now you can change this sync setting from the Live Mesh software on your computer, without having to visit the Live Desktop at all.

· You can drag and drop files to folders on your Live Desktop. One of the most frequently requested features since we opened Live Mesh as a technology preview in April has been the ability to drag and drop files and folders to and from your Live Desktop. We’re extremely happy to be able to say: You can do this now! This makes the Live Desktop experience much more intuitive and even more aligned with Windows. Note that the drag-and-drop feature currently only works with a Windows PC and Internet Explorer 6 or later.

· You can select multiple files for upload or download. In addition to drag-and-drop, you can now use SHIFT and CTRL to select multiple files/folders when uploading them to your Live Desktop.

· Added new synchronization status indicators. If you’ve been using Live Mesh to sync a lot of data, you’ve probably found yourself wondering at some point how far along the synchronization process was. We’ve added an icon to the notification area of the taskbar and a progress bar so that you can tell at a glance how your folder sync is coming.

· “Get started” feature added for new users. Quick tips on how to start using Live Mesh appear on the Live Desktop and when new users install the Live Mesh software. Great for friends and family you invite!

Additional improvements:

· Improved peer-to-peer (P2P) reliability and performance. P2P synchronization is an integral part of how Live Mesh keeps your data current across all your devices. Most of the time, P2P sync happens in the background without you having to worry about it. When Live Mesh tries to update a file on one of your devices, it will leverage whatever connections it can, sometimes pulling from your Live Desktop (the “cloud”), other times pulling from your other devices. You can also choose to have some folders only sync P2P by choosing to never synchronize those folders with your Live Desktop. We have made numerous improvements to P2P sync with this release of Live Mesh. We’re now regularly testing synchronization of folders as large as 60GB, and we’ve also had success synching a single file as large as 20GB.

· Hidden remote screen is now the default for Live Mesh Remote Desktop. We heard feedback from many customers that they’d like to see this feature turned on by default to help ensure the privacy of their remote desktop feature.

· Improved conflict resolution. The user interface (UI) for resolving conflicts has been updated to be easier to use. You’ll also now see the same conflict resolution UI between the Live Mesh software on your device and the Live Desktop on the web. And, when resolving a conflict, you’ll be able to choose keep either version of a file or all versions.

· The Live Mesh bar appears minimized by default, and remembers its previous state. When you create a new Live Mesh folder, the mesh bar (appears when you open a Live Mesh folder) will now appear minimized by default. The mesh bar will also remember the last state it was in (minimized or maximized) for each Live Mesh folder, and show that state the next time you open the folder.

· Better support for large display configurations using Live Mesh Remote Desktop. We’ve added a new “superpan” feature to improve support for large desktop display configurations (e.g., high-resolution displays or multiple monitors).

· Added support for two-factor authentication for Live Mesh Remote Desktop. Enterprise customers can now require two-factor authentication (both domain password and smartcard) for Live Mesh Remote Desktop on networks, or choose to disable the Live Mesh Remote Desktop functionality altogether.

· Install Live Mesh with roaming profiles. The Live Mesh client now supports installing to a user account with roaming profiles. Previously users may have noticed an inability to sync or remotely access devices that use roaming profiles.

Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) reminder

While we no longer require that UAC be turned on when running Live Mesh on Vista SP1, if you initially installed Live Mesh with UAC turned on, and then turned it off, you might have some issues upgrading. Please see “NOTICE: Updating Live Mesh and User Account Control (UAC)” in the Known Issues sticky on the Live Mesh forums for further information.

PDC 2008 – Live Mesh entra em beta e está aberto para todos

Galileu — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:31:00 GMT

Uns meses atrás quando primeiro lançamos o Live Mesh ele estava restrito a alguns países. Nós conseguíamos usar o Live Mesh no Brasil mas só com algumas gambiarras. Hoje no PDC 2008 o time do Live Mesh liberou a versão beta (estava em alpha até hoje) que permite que qualquer um do mundo experimente a tecnologia. Foi inclusive liberada a versão alpha para Mac OSX e Windows Mobile. Infelizmente a versão Windows Mobile está disponível somente para Estados Unidos e Reino Unido. Porém, o portal WAP do Live Mesh está aberto e também permite upload e download de arquivos a partir de qualquer celular com acesso WAP. O URL para o portal WAP é http://m.mesh.com. Então vá ao site do Live Mesh e comece a brincar com essa tecnologia, pois ela é sensacional. E veja o vídeo do Live Mesh no Soapbox para entender a nossa visão para o Live Mesh.

First Look: Live Mesh Client for Mac

Larry — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:28:00 GMT

Noah Edelstein stopped by and gave us a first look at the Mac client for Live Mesh, so now if you've got some electro-diversity in your home ecosphere, you can drag & drop, share & push all your files to your other machines just like the I'm a PC folks.

If you're already a Live Mesh user, this will be a familiar look for you, although some of the UI has been tweaked to conform with Mac norms. If you're dying to get your Mesh on your Mac, head over to mesh.com and sign-up, so that you'll be ready to be a part of this limited release once it goes live later today.

Ori Amiga's MeshMobile - Very Cool!

Larry — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:27:00 GMT

I followed Charles Torre recently to meet with Ori Amiga from the Mesh team and see his "Mesh Mobile". Ori and some other folks tricked out his car with a custom display and PC, controlled with touch, voice, and a Griffin Powermate. It is incredibly cool.

Because his car is 'on the Mesh', Ori can sync his music automatically, and even send an invite to his mechanic to view his telemetry and diagnostics in real time. With the built in navigation he can even share his location with people through Mesh.

Sneak Peek at Live Mesh for Mobile

sarahintampa — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:52:00 GMT

At the Microsoft TechEd Australia 2008 conference keynote this morning, Dr. Neil and Amit Mital showed a quick preview of the Live Mesh application running on a Windows Palm Treo Pro. Long Zeng has the screenshots on his blog. In the demo, they showed how quickly a mobile photo could be synced to all the other devices on the Mesh. When will we see the mobile Mesh client app? “In the coming months,” they say.

In the meantime, it’s not like you have to do without – the Mobile Mesh web page is available at m.mesh.com from your mobile phone. It works OK on my Blackberry Pearl (for viewing at least) and you can view your files from an iPhone, too. However, a native mobile app for my Blackberry would be even better. Hopefully, the Live Mesh for Windows Mobile client will be the first step towards that goal.

Mesh Your Bookmarks!

sarahintampa — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:11:00 GMT

One of the most useful things you can do with Live Mesh, beyond just syncing files and folders, is syncing your bookmarks. This is as simple as right-clicking on your Favorites folder and adding it to the Mesh. (Doug has more detailed instructions on this here). When you do this on all your machines, you’ll end up with a merged directory of all your Favorites so you can manage your bookmarks from in one location, no matter how many machines you have. How handy is that? You can even access them from any other computer that has internet access just by logging into your Live Desktop. And don’t forget that Live Mesh lets you invite others to share a folder, so, if you wanted to share your bookmarks, for example, with a team at work so everyone could contribute, you could that, too.

Live Mesh Expands To More Countries

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:43:00 GMT

Today, the Live Mesh team announced the expansion of their service into other markets. Now the list of countries that will allow sign-up without a wait list for the Live Mesh Tech Preview includes Canada, India, and Ireland. This is in addition to USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, for whom Live Mesh has already been made available. The announcement was posted today to the Live Mesh blog, where they also pointed us to other Live Mesh resources, including these Channel 9 videos and the link to the Community Forums, which is where you can send in Live Mesh feedback.

Live Mesh For Mac Is Here

sarahintampa — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:57:00 GMT

Windows Live Mesh, the new S+S (software plus services) platform for data synchronization has received a lot of attention this month. First, it opened up its private beta to all of the U.S. (and others who were willing to edit their regional settings), next they released their mobile version, and then the rumors of the Mac version were revealed to be true when LiveSide discovered the Mac client. But today, Mac users don’t have to wait any longer to try Live Mesh - the Mac version has finally been officially released.

According to this page on Microsoft’s Live Mesh site, the Mac version is now ready for download. It reads that with the Live Mesh Mac extender, you can

Add your Mac to your Live Mesh - it will appear with your other devices on www.mesh.com and throughout the Live Mesh UI.

Synchronize files between your Mac, your other computers, and your Live Desktop.

Synchronize folder contents between your Mac and other folder members.

Easily access Live Mesh news, your Live Desktop, and manage your devices from the Live Mesh menu bar item.

Receive notifications through Live Mesh when updates are available and easily update the Live Mesh extender for Mac.

But, be warned, the Mac version is still under development, so there may be issues with it. Please use it at your own risk.

Now that you’ve been warned, go get it.

Live Mesh Updated

sarahintampa — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:34:00 GMT

The next big update for Live Mesh has arrived and with it several new features have been added thanks to popular demand. One of the biggest new features is the ability to sync Live Mesh folders peer-to-peer only, excluding your Live Desktop. This means you can sync files across your devices but bypass the Live Mesh cloud storage service where you’re currently limited to only 5 GB of storage space.

This is great news for me because I maxed out my Live Desktop long ago - now at least I’m no longer prevented from Mesh’ing up everything I want – I just won’t be able to access those additional files online from other computers that aren’t my own.

Additionally, the new version of Live Mesh lets you manage file conflicts on the Live Desktop and it adds new “News Events” for when you add or delete folders from Live Mesh. A few more bug fixes and performance improvements round out this release.

Now, I’m off to Mesh up (hmm, that sounds wrong…) every folder I have.

Live Mesh Goes Mobile

sarahintampa — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:50:00 GMT

Yesterday, the Live Mesh team surprised everyone by m.mesh.com to your mesh, which can then be used to move your mobile content to – for example, images and videos you took with your mobile phone. There’s also a homepage link that can be used to create a Mobile Pictures folder for you. To see a bunch of screenshots of the mobilized version of Mesh, check out LiveSide, who broke the news (img courtesy of LiveSide)

It’s Official – Live Mesh Now Open to All of U.S.

sarahintampa — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:11:00 GMT

Before we even had an official announcement, LiveSide was reporting last night that folks were able to sign up for Windows Live Mesh if they were located in the U.S. This morning, they confirmed this to be the case. The official announcement was made in the Live Mesh Forum. It read:

Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!

International Customers

With Live Mesh open to anyone in the US, our international friends can join in the fun early as well - with one caveat: you must be willing to change your Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US. Once you do this you will be able to immediately sign in to Live Mesh with a valid Windows Live ID. Please be aware that this may cause other applications that specifically require your native country region and language settings to encounter problems.

Feedback

Once you've begun using Live Mesh, we'd love to hear from you! We are working hard to create the best experience and appreciate any feedback you have. Please send us feedback using our online form. You can also submit (and view others') feedback and bugs here on the Microsoft Connect website.

Thank you,
The Live Mesh team

About Live Mesh

If you haven’t checked out Mesh yet, you should. This software+services data synchronization platform isn't built with proprietary code, but rather with open protocols like HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON. Although Mesh's FeedSync is somewhat new, it is an XML protocol based on ATOM and RSS.

With Mesh running on your computers, you can simply right-click any folder and choose "Add to Mesh." By doing so, that folder and all the files it contains are synchronized with all of your other computers you've added to your personal Mesh. It also syncs those files to the Live Mesh Desktop, which is Mesh's "cloud" - an online web site you can access from any computer. At the moment, the online storage is limited to 5 GB, but that could change in the future. However, Mesh's recent update allows you to set folders to sync via peer-to-peer, bypassing Live Desktop. When folders are Mesh-enabled, a small panel appears to the right of the folder in explorer which catalogs any changes to the folder (file adds/moves/deletions) as well as notes and comments left by any of the folder's members.

Live Mesh also lets you access all your “meshified” computers remotely, so if you have software that is installed only on one PC, you can use Live Mesh to access that computer as interact with it as if you were sitting in front of it.

Although today’s release doesn’t include a Mac version, we know that it’s under development and should be available soon.

Vídeo: Atualização no Live Mesh permite assistir os vídeos armazenados na Web

Galileu — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:56:00 GMT

Estava lendo uns emails quando vi que um colega na empresa tinha reparado uma pequena, porém importante, novidade no Live Mesh. Já é possível assistir vídeos dentro do Mesh Desktop. Para lembrar a todos, o Live Mesh é uma plataforma que conecta dispositvos, serviços e arquivos visando um mundo onde todas as nossas informações importantes sempre estarão ao nosso alcance. Você pode ver um exemplo bem claro nesse vídeo aqui.

No Live Mesh o usuário tem um área de trabalho na Web chamada Web Desktop. Nessa área você pode acessar os seus arquivos de qualquer computador ou navegador Web, graças ao Silverlight. E agora você consegue não só baixar esses arquivos mas também visualizar suas fotos, ouvir suas músicas e, a novidade, ver os seus vídeos. O Ray Ozzie disse antes do lançamento do Live Mesh que será possível licenciar conteúdo uma só vez e assitir em qualquer dispositivo ou na Web. Assista a demonstração que gravei em vídeo e você verá que esse momento não está longe.

Live Mesh Screencasts & Videos

sarahintampa — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:28:00 GMT

Steve Clayton just found some great links for those interested in Live Mesh - screencasts! Available from the "Learn More" section of the Mesh homepage, these screencasts show you how certain aspects of Live Mesh work:

In addition to screencasts, you can also find videos on Channels 9 and here on 10 about Mesh:

More on Mesh: Running the Cloud

sarahintampa — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:14:00 GMT

Now that I'm learning more about Mesh, I'm surprised at what a big undertaking it is. For example, this recent post on the Live Mesh blog talks about how they run the cloud services, which offers some interesting insights into how Mesh's "services" part of their "Software + Services" works.

In Mesh, writes Alex Mallet, a dev lead on the Live Mesh team, cloud services can be grouped into four areas:

Feed & Data Sync
Authentication & Authorization
Maintaining & Fanning out the Transient State
Connectivity Services for Sync and Remote Desktop Access

Mesh's front-end services are accessible only via HTTPS. Back-end services use HTTPS and custom protocols layered on TCP. Most services are written in C# and all services sit on top of a common runtime library.

What's really interesting though (and funny!) is when Mallet describes building the full-scale datacenter deployment and management system: he says they "chose the lazy smart route" to do so. The Mesh team used the the Autopilot framework, which is currently used by the Windows Live Search team to manage tens of thousands of datacenter machines. Mesh isn't there yet, but hopes to be!

If learning more about the services part of Mesh is the sort of thing that interests you, go ask your question in the comments section of his post.

Playing with Live Mesh: First Experiences

sarahintampa — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:17:00 GMT

Since I got invited to Live Mesh earlier this week, I've been playing around with the settings, adding devices, and sharing folders. It's pretty impressive how easy Mesh was to install and set up. I just downloaded and installed a small software app that runs in my system tray and then, on www.mesh.com, I added the computer I was using to Mesh.

On each PC, I picked a few folders (Documents, Downloads, and Pictures) and right-clicked on them, choosing "Add Folder to Your Live Mesh." It was that easy, I swear.

What's really cool about Mesh is that I could finally sync up my documents, photos, etc. from all my PCs to essentially merge together and become one, big, "meshed" folder. It didn't get all confused that I was syncing up a folder called Documents to another folder called Documents. It just knew what I wanted to do. After syncing, I was surprised at how much duplicate content I had, probably from having to move files to and from PCs the old fashioned way - email, USB drives, via the network, etc.

When conflicts arose, I had the option of viewing both files and choosing which one to keep. But what was really great is that the conflicts weren't displayed as annoying pop-up messages while in the middle of syncing, thank goodness - they were just items in a list that I could review at my leisure.

I'd like the option to keep both copies of some files, but, at the moment, you have to pick one to keep or just leave the conflict be. The only problem with this is that Windows Live Messenger chat logs for the same contact had the same name on different machines and I wanted to keep both logs. Other than that, I could rename documents and photos to resolve the duplicately named, but different, files, but I'm still hoping for a "keep both files" button in a future release.

When viewing a Mesh-enabled folder, a pop-up window appears next to the Windows Explorer window, showing the history of your interactions with the folder (Sarah added this, Sarah deleted that), conflicts, members, and synchronized devices.

Although Mesh is going to do much more than just this syncing in the future, for now, it's providing a great way to keep my files in sync as I move from computer to computer.

I also discovered that I could invite some friends to Mesh by sharing a folder with them, something that could be done from either a PC or my Live Mesh online desktop. If you have Live Mesh and haven't shared your invites, please do so! I know some people who are *dying* for them.

If you want to learn more about Mesh and its future, I found the article and interview by Steve Gillmor, speaking with Microsoft Mesh lead David Treadwell (who should really start blogging again) absolutely fascinating. Be warned though, this isn't the kind of article you should skim quickly. Save it for when you have some time to grab a cup of coffee, sit down, read, re-read, and really take it all in. It's worth it, I promise. If that sounds like something you would like to do in that alternative universe where you can actually sit down and read things, well then, just go get the podcast and listen to it on your commute instead.