Good thing our friend Long Zheng is an accomplished lurker, as his annoying persistent hanging around the Live Mesh guys at Microsoft’s Tech Ed Australia paid off last week.  Long got what we think is the first public look at Live Mesh Apps, in the form of a demo “Tracker” app, running on the Live Desktop (the one “in the cloud”), and also, by using some Live Mesh trickery and an instance of Internet Explorer, on the (real) desktop.

Long explains:

…the same demo Mesh application “Tracker” - a simple to-do list app can be run from both the Mesh desktop in the browser and on the actual Windows desktop as a (sort of) real application. To achieve this run-everywhere application experience, the Mesh apps on the desktop actually run inside a chromeless Internet Explorer wrapper provided by the Mesh Operating Environment (version 0.9.3104.1 for those of you playing at home). Ignore the bug with the Mesh panel on the desktop thinking it’s a folder.

(more about Live Mesh Apps at istartedsomething.com)

Nice work, Long! – oh, and Angus Logan?  We need to talk, buddy ;).

By the way speaking of Live Mesh bugs, some problems still remain with the current Live Mesh build.  Unfortunately the fix that was issued last Thursday needs fixing of its own.  Nadia Fortini of the Live Mesh team posted a note on the forums on Saturday (and unfortunately it sounds like most of the Live Mesh team worked through the weekend on the issue):

We have found a major issue with our mapping/unmapping feature that will get worse if you try to uninstall Live Mesh. Please do not change the state of your Live Mesh folders at this time, until we have a fix deployed. This issue has been mostly detected with folders with many files and shared among many people. If you are seeing duplicates files, files or folders missing, or many conflicts, do not take any action until we post clear instructions for fixing the issue. We are actively working on this and will keep you updated on our progress shortly.
Thank you all for your patience and collaboration in helping the Live Mesh team release a better product.
Nadia Fortini
Live Mesh Team

Not good news but a temporary issue, and we should be seeing a fix very soon.  For now, do heed Nadia’s advice and leave your little blue folders alone!