LiveSide - News blog : Apple

Microsoft’s Live Labs develops SeaDragon app for the iPhone

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:47:13 GMT

Hot on the heels of the Thumbtack Live Labs release, Microsoft’s incubation team down in Pioneer Square just released the first Microsoft app for the iPhone, SeaDragon Mobile. From the AppStore:

Get the goodness of Seadragon on your iPhone!
Browse large quantities of high-resolution imagery smoothly and quickly with a flick or a pinch. Explore massive galaxies, pore over maps, or flip through collections of photographs, all over the air. You can also add your own photos or browse those already available on Photosynth.com.
FEATURES:
- View thousands of images over the air
- Quickly view massive gigapixel images
- Explore Photosynth collections in 2D, including your own
- Add your own PhotoZoom / Deep Zoom Composer content
- Subscribe to Deep Zoom RSS feeds
Released as a tech preview, Seadragon Mobile is designed to show off the 'what if?' of mobile user experiences. Expect more cool stuff from Live Labs in the future at http://livelabs.com.

More on the SeaDragon Mobile release over at TechFlash, where Todd Bishop is working on weekends even without a Yahoo! acquisition rumor to keep him huddled over the keyboard.

Live Mesh Mac client now not available for download [Updated]

Chris — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:32:52 GMT

~~No announcement yet but Microsoft has now made the Live Mesh client for Mac available for download from mesh.com. Check it out at at the~~ ~~Mac download page~~ ~~and see for yourself. There is a disclaimer that its still under development, however its great to see the team acknowledging the huge demand for this and making it available to the public.~~

Update: Turns out the client wasn’t quite ready for the prime-time yet as the download page and link have been removed :’(

PS: If you think we’re keen for the Mac client, you should see how crazy we are for mobile clients!

This comes a week after we previewed a Mac pre-beta client. Here’s a list of the features that are in the Mac version we previewed already as well as a comparison to Windows client.

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.

On OS X, Mesh is integrated into Finder, showing the Mesh sidebar alongside the folder view. The Meshbar provides the basic functionality of configuring the sharing of folders with other users and devices. Look similar to the Windows version? It should do.

The synchronisation options should also be familiar, allowing for synching folders just to the cloud, to other devices or in the future, strictly p2p.

Images courtesy of jkontherun

As Kip mentioned yesterday, you can now also install Live Mesh on your Windows Server, including Windows Home Server as well. Oh and don’t forgot the mobile Mesh access too, available through your mobile browser at http://m.mesh.com. It works on the iPhone as well as on Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Symbian devices, unfortunately upload functionality is currently limited to just the Pocket IE browser.

Tip us if you spot any other Mesh goodies!

Pre-Beta Mac client for Live Mesh – Review only [updated]

Chris — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:42:00 GMT

After the recent flurry of Live Mesh posts we’ve done in the last 2 weeks, here’s one more. With all the recent updates that have gone on, users have been looking for client applications to run on devices other than Windows PCs, specifically for Macs and mobile devices. Check out the comments on the Live Mesh blog to see what I mean.

After a large slice of luck and a little investigative work on our part, ~~we bring you a download link for the Mac~~ installer . Its worth highlighting here that 1) this is not a beta release, therefore still a work in progress and is still under development 2) functionality isn’t complete 3) performance isn’t optimised 4) it has bugs and may not work correctly and 5) please re-read this sentence again. MS took it down now, so just screenshots for now.

Of course not having a Mac it was somewhat difficult for us to review the Mac client, so we turned to James and Kevin, bloggers from jkontherun, for their thoughts and screenshots. For those who don’t read the blog, these guys are to mobile devices as we are to Windows Live. Here’s the highlights, check out their post for more information. The key difference to the Windows client seems to be the lack of Remote Desktop functionality, you'll see from the screenshots below that the overall feel and functionality are very similar.

Please note: this was only tested this on Intel machines using OS X Leopard 10.5.4.

Update

Finder Integration

Here's the Mesh integrated into Finder on the Mac, showing the Mesh sidebar alongside. The Meshbar shows the members and synchronised devices just as on Windows devices.

Sync Options

Synchronisation options for each directory are again similar to what we're used to with Windows devices. Consistency across devices is clearly a key factor here, meaning that users only have to learn how to use Live Mesh once.

Images courtesy of jkontherunClubhouse

Microsoft opens up Live Mesh for basic mobile access

Chris — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:22:00 GMT

After a great tip from one of our readers in our first Mesh tutorial, it appears as though the Live Mesh mobile portal has now also been opened up to the public. Available at http://m.mesh.com, the website provides access to the basic functionality of Live Mesh through the browser, albeit without the ability to automatically synchronise folders that comes with a native client application. Its a start however, so here’s our quick walkthrough.

First you’ll need to sign in with the LiveID you use for Mesh. While it can be a bit cumbersome to enter the first time around, the username + password ~~tend to get automatically saved between sessions~~ are not saved between sessions on Live Mesh, which is different to other Windows Live mobile properties.

Once you’ve logged in, the homepage shows the aggregated news feed for all your folders, including new people joining your Mesh and new files/folders that have been created. Across the top of the page there are two tabs, News and Folders

The folders page does exactly what it says, listing out all the directories from your existing Mesh along with the individual news feed and the members of that folder. Functionality such as adding a folder and file is built-in, along with the ability to get at files already in your Mesh – great for getting that important piece of work you didn’t want to email to yourself.

Also available direct from the homepage is the ability to upload mobile photos to your Mesh, which auto-creates a Mobile Pictures folder for you. This is very useful for people without much storage on their mobile device, and provides a great alternative to hooking up your phone to the PC/Mac just to transfer photos across at the end of the day. While transfer will be slow if you don’t have a 3G connection or above, Mesh is definitely not slow, updating the new feed straightaway.

I’ll update this later after I’ve had more of a play. Thoughts welcome!

Update: Turns out it works pretty well on the iPhone too, but no upload feature. The comments show there's rendering issues with Opera Mobile and Symbian devices, but it works ok on Blackberry (apparently no upload again though?). Keep the details coming, especially concerning which phones do/don't have upload capabilities.

Keep informed of Live Mesh updates via our RSS feed, or check out our new FriendFeed.

Apple announces Windows Live rival – we’re jealous

Chris — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:39:19 GMT

At Apple’s annual WWDC event, held today, Steve Jobs announced a new software+services product: MobileMe. Offering to synchronise emails, contact, and calendar data, the new service seems just like Windows Live. Except cooler (check out the screenshots) and also coming in at a fairly hefty $99 a year.

Firstly Apple announced a whole range of web-based applications to complement the existing desktop applications. There’s an email application in the browser, which from the screenshot looks very clean. Hotmail team take note. Contacts also synchronise between devices, similar to Windows Live for Windows Mobile if you are running that.

Then there’s the photos application, again it looks great in the browser, but as its not available until July we can’t comment on performance. For sure Apple has just raised the benchmark on Web2.0 design.

Finally they demoed a Calendar application in the browser. Looks pretty basic but still, it synchronises with the desktop (luckily for us the upcoming beta version of Windows Live Mail has that functionality too). Apple manages to get the calendar synchronising with the iPhone though, talk about delivering it all in one go. Impressed, yes.

Engadget mentions that iDisk, Apple’s equivalent of Skydrive is getting an upgrade too, offering 20GB of online storage. The Apple website explains that the iDisk functionality allows users to access files from any Mac or PC, however it doesn’t appear as though these changes are synchronised between between devices. The ability to share folders with friends is there though, so to me this appears to be a SkyDrive, not Live Mesh competitor.

From a first look though, Apple’s consumer offering here is a) more complete than Windows Live b) packaged better but c) more expensive. We’ll definitely be giving the 60 day free trial a go once it’s available.

(Images taken from Engadget liveblog)