Today you will be prompted to update Live Mesh (I just got prompted myself), if you are logged in as admin or if you are on an account with admin rights. This update changes the Live Mesh Remote Desktop component of the software, and will not be reflected in the version numbers viewable through the Notifier or on the Live Desktop.

Version numbers:
Live Mesh software: 0.9.3103.14
Live Desktop: 0.9.3103.18

Should you experience any remote desktop issues after you've updated the Live Mesh software, restart your computer. If after that you still have problems restoring Live Mesh functionality head over to the Live Mesh Forums for additional support.

Live Mesh Blog

Just in from Microsoft Research, a new tool for ranking, sorting, and sharing search results called URank.  URank, a research prototype developed at Microsoft Research by Emre Kiciman, Shuo Chen, and  intern Konstantin Mertsalov, with some help apparently from Greg Linden  and others, allows you to move search results around to personalize your searches, collaborate with others to share searches, and much more.

You can watch a screencast of URank (“IE8 users, right-click and download the file and open in Windows Media Player”), learn more from the FAQ, check out the home page, or play around with URank yourself (feel free to add kip [at] LiveSide [dot] net as a friend).

Over the next couple days the Live Mesh Servers will undergo some maintenance. During this time you may experience Live Mesh service outages, including Live Mesh folders that are not synchronizing, or an inability to establish Live Mesh Remote Desktop connections to your devices.

Just thought we’d let you know, so you don’t think something’s wrong at your end should you experience any of these ;)

Live Mesh
Live Mesh Forums

Good to see the Windows Live Wire blog start to focus on Wave 3, this time with a good post by Eric Doerr on Windows Live Movie Maker.  If you’ve taken a look at Windows Live Movie Maker, you’ve no doubt noticed that it is, well, lacking.  Eric explains in the post, however, that because of advances in the way that we create and use digital video, Microsoft decided to start over from scratch with Windows Live Movie Maker, including revamping the UI to make use of the “ribbon” interface common to Office 2007 applications.

After a lot of investigation, we decided to start fresh. We were inspired by the video-sharing solutions that were starting to spring up, and we were intrigued by the rapid advancements in graphics hardware, especially the increasingly capable GPUs on the latest video cards. And we were impressed with the results realized by Microsoft Office 2007 and the new "ribbon" user interface model.

The new user interface for Windows Live Movie Maker is much simpler than the Windows Movie Maker, perhaps a little too simple according to some comments on the Live Wire post.  The “Timeline” is gone from the current beta version, and the commenters are asking for it back.  Good thing this is still an early beta.

Windows Live Movie Maker should make it much easier to publish to the web, according to the blog post:

Meanwhile, the Windows Live Photo Gallery folks had been working on a plug-in SDK for sharing video and photos. We think the lines between photos and video are blurring fast, and we know that our customers use lots of different sharing services, and we think that's cool, too. So, we decided to make the plug-in platform support photos and video and use it in both the Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. We're providing one plug-in for Movie Maker (to Soapbox on MSN Video), but we expect to see most of the sharing sites supported fairly quickly.

It’s pretty obvious that Windows Live Movie Maker is still in its early stages of development, but still we appreciate the explanation of what we’re seeing now, and at least a hint of what to expect.  Check out the blog post for more.

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control is not small weighing in at 217KB when compressed in Version 6.2. When you require the rich experience of Virtual Earth this size is not an issue, the control is aimed at broadband users and within a few moments of interacting with the map you can easy exceed this with the rich imagery being loaded on demand. But what if your web page only needs to show the Virtual Earth map when a user asks for it or you just want your page to load super fast? You need to load Virtual Earth on demand.

See an example here: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/examples/VE62/loadondemand.htm (view source for full code)

Are you in one of those countries where Microsoft Virtual Earth didn’t have good imagery? Good news for you, and for all those who like to watch these countries with VE too of course and for VE in general. There’s a partnership with Digital Globe, which will result in a Worldwide imagery improvement. Chris Pendleton announces:

…We now have access to one of the highest resolution global satellite imagery and aerial photography collections (460 million sq. km. + 1 million sq. km. per day moving forward) through a deal we've just struck with DigitalGlobe. We'll finally be able to backfill areas around the world where people have come to my blog and complained about Virtual Earth not having good imagery or photos in their countries - Poland, Hungary, Russia, Taiwan, Mexico, to name a few - I've heard you loud and clear. And, now, we're fixing that problem. Read the press release below:

DigitalGlobe Announces New Content Partnership for Virtual Earth With Microsoft
Longmont, Colo., October 7, 2008 – DigitalGlobe, a leading global content provider of high-resolution world imagery solutions, today announced that it has signed an agreement with Microsoft Corp. for a multi-year contract under which DigitalGlobe will provide Microsoft’s Virtual Earth with its premium, high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery.
Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will have access to DigitalGlobe’s vast ImageLibrary, which contains over 460 million square kilometers of premium earth imagery, as well as new images being collected every day by its growing constellation of satellites.
“DigitalGlobe’s strategic approach to collecting earth imagery allows us to provide our customers with the high-resolution content they need,” said Erik Jorgensen, corporate vice president of Virtual Earth at Microsoft. “With its growing constellation of satellites, large network of aerial partners and a proven track record for delivering a large volume of new earth imagery, DigitalGlobe will be a key content partner for the Virtual Earth Platform.”

DigitalGlobe has been the pioneer in making earth imagery available worldwide for web portals and mobile mapping applications.  Its high-resolution satellite constellation and aerial program collect nearly 1 million square kilometers of earth imagery each day, with much of this imagery available via its online services.

“We are proud to partner with one of the world’s great technology companies,” said Marc Tremblay, senior vice president and general manager of DigitalGlobe’s Commercial Business Unit. “We look forward to working with the Virtual Earth team in the years to come as they continue to expand this powerful geospatial platform.” 

CP

That’s really great news, thanks Chris.

Speaking of Microsoft Virtual Earth, if you are a developer check out the posts of our VE specialist John O'Brien. Missed out on the Virtual Earth 6.2 Technical Webcast? No problem, this is now available on demand at Mark Brown's Virtual Earth Blog. The Windows Live Virtual Earth developers site can be found here, should you want to dive in even more.

Interested in what goes on behind the scenes of Virtual Earth? Check out the Video series - Behind The Maps.

LiveSide - Virtual Earth

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control has supported tile overlays for some time. A tile layer is set of 256px square images matching the Mercator projection of Virtual Earth. Tile layers are usually layered on top of Virtual Earth, the control supports transparency and an opacity of the entire layer. With the latest release of Version 6.2 of the control you can now disable the base tile layers allowing for greater performance when your tiles are all you need. Lets look at what is required to load OpenStreetMap tiles into Virtual Earth.

Mashable just spotted the new implementation of Live Search integrated into Facebook.  According to Mashable:

The implementation is fairly straightforward: in the search box on the top right of Facebook, which is also used for quick access to your friends’ profiles and intrasite search, there is now an option to “Search the Web,” which in turn triggers a query of Microsoft Live Search. Results then display within a custom interface designed for Facebook.

What does WorldWide Telescope have to do with Microsoft Virtual Earth?

Chris Pendleton explains:

… since Microsoft Virtual Earth is a part of that Microsoft Research project I thought it would interest some of you that we decided to include some of the WorldWide Telescope into Virtual Earth. Did you know that the Virtual Earth data centers host all of the data for WWT and that the actual Earth in WWT are Virtual Earth tiles? Well, now you do.

Hmm Earth – Sky, but what of WWT got into Virtual Earth?

The constellations. More specifically, the stars. In the latest release of the Virtual Earth 3D control, we included the accurate placement of stars in space. The stars are drawn leveraging the Hipparcos catalogue and differ based on magnitude and color. The Hipparcos (HIgh Precision PARallax COlletion Satellite) catalogue is the de facto measurement of the stellar parallax and the proper motion of the stars.

Neat! Chris also reminds us we can still download WorldWide Telescope for free! Go go go…

LiveSide - WorldWide Telescope
LiveSide - Virtual Earth