LiveSide - News blog : Mesh

Live Mesh Beta update – Initial review

Chris — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:40:00 GMT

Now that the Live Mesh team has finished rolling out their update, here’s a quick overview of the new stuff (beyond the obvious like this now being a beta with worldwide availability).

Progress meters in the Live Mesh client – this was a popular request ever since Mesh first rolled out in the CTP, as it was impossible to accurately tell how much had been uploaded or downloaded. The data was available definitely wasn’t reliable, but this appears to have changed for the better with the latest update.

Now there are both upload and download meters available for each device, and our initial tests showed they were reliable indicators of progress.

P2P Sync options in the client – While P2P synchronising has been available in the web desktop for some time, you can now set this option direct from the client. This allows you to transmit larger files direct to other machines, without using up your 5GB storage online.

Right click the Live Mesh folder you want to make p2p only, then click Live Mesh Options – Change Sync Settings

Roles – Now you can set the read / write access of users who have access to your files. Again this can be set through the Live Mesh options available in the client, or via the Web Desktop. Four roles are available, Reader, Contributor, Owner and Creator, with access controls in cumulative order being Read, Write and Delete, Manage Users, Stop Synchronising respectively.

Drag & Drop – Now you can drag and drop files from the pc desktop straight into the web desktop. You’ll need to install an activex control, which unfortunately makes this feature limited to Internet Explorer only for the moment.

Overall the feature-set of the update is good, especially with the Mac and Windows Mobile clients becoming available. See our earlier post on the pre-beta Mac client for screenshots, but Kevin Tofel confirms there is still no remote access.

A word of warning, we’ve noticed some significant performance issues since the update. This ranges from the slow loading of folders and file contents on the web desktop, through to the client rendering a PC unresponsive due to prolonged periods of heavy cpu usage, whilst uploading. While we hope its just teething problems, its yet another reminder that Software+Services still has some quirks to overcome (the first being that since upgrading to Windows Mobile 6.1, I can’t synchronise my Windows Live contacts. Helpful!)

Update: Lots of reported issues with mobile so not working just yet, oops. There should be a new build out v. soon to resolve the issues people are having. In the mean time check out the Live Mesh Mobile forums.

Live Mesh updates announced at PDC

Chris — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:30:41 GMT

Live Mesh is going into Beta later this week, along with support for Mac and Windows Mobile 6 clients. Other changes coming later this week (from the Live Mesh blog):

- Drag & Drop functionality in the Live Mesh Desktop

- Extending the Live Mesh roles

- Ability to sync p2p only will be available from local devices

You can check out the new Mesh site that is coming at https://developer.mesh-ctp.com/Welcome/default.aspx. It’ll roll out to mesh.com at a later date.

Interestingly enough, going forward Mesh going to be included as part of Windows Live. Not quite sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I guess only time will tell.

And for developers, the Live Framework CTP available from www.azure.com available later today.

Live Mesh Expands

ScottIsAFool — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:15:00 GMT

Amit Mital posts on the Live Mesh blog that the CTP has now been expanded to include Canada, India and Ireland. One thing Amit does point out though is:

We do still have a maximum limit on the number of users we’ll allow into the Technology Preview, but as long as we’re below the limit, anyone in the countries above can sign-up today with no delays or wait list.

So make sure you sign up quickly.

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.

Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

Chris — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:55:00 GMT

With yesterday’s Live Mesh update that allows users to enable peer-to-peer synchronisation and miss out the cloud sync, we thought we’d take a look at one practical example of this – browser favourites. The scenario is familiar, you’re not on your main device and you come across a website you want to visit later. While you could just email yourself the link, or add it to Del.ici.ous, this is an alternative that requires no extra effort on your part once set up.

While we performed this using Internet Explorer, the process is exactly the same for the browser of your choice. Just substitute the folder locations in steps 1 and 3 as appropriate. For Firefox it would be the Profiles folder containing the bookmarks.htm file, and this would then save you from using the Foxmarks extension.

Step 1: Navigate to the browser favourites folder on your first device, right click and choose Add To Mesh – I’ll call the synchronised folder “Favourites” for the purpose of this example.

For Internet Explorer in Windows Vista the default folder can be found at <username>\Favourites, for Firefox it can be found at <username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (more info).

Step 2: Change the synchronisation settings so that it only maps to the web desktop. The first time I tried this the correct way around (ie not mapping to the web) but it didn’t work so well - we'll reverse this in Step 5. Click Ok to turn this into a Mesh folder. Note that as its a special Windows folder, it won’t turn blue.

Step 3: In your second device, click the Live Mesh icon in the system tray to view the list of active folders. The Favourites folder shared in device 1 should be transparent, showing that its not currently being synchronised to this device. Click the folder name and then set the location to be the existing browser favourites folder. Here that folder is on the D:\.

Step 4: Live Mesh will then prompt you to merge the existing browser favourites folder with Favourites, your synchronised folder. Accept this prompt.

Step 5: In the web desktop, right click the Favourites folder and change the synchronisation options to remove the Web Desktop, leaving just the devices you have setup already. Accept the prompt by selecting Continue.

You’ll then notice the folder goes transparent, just like it was at the start of step 2 when we added it to the second device, implying no synchronisation. This is the “Ghosting” feature talked about in the Channel 9 video posted yesterday.

Step 6: Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for any other devices that you’d like to share browser favourites with.

While this is just a simple example, there are whole lot of other possibilities that are now open. For example, synchronising media libraries across multiple machines (Home & Work), sharing application settings that are not stored in the registry and above all, sharing the special folders in Windows: Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Desktop etc.

Give it a try and let us know if you come up with any great scenarios so we can feature them.

Looking at the Live Mesh peer-to-peer synch

Chris — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:52:37 GMT

Channel9 posted an interesting video looking behind the scenes at the Live Mesh peer-to-peer synch. Its 30mins long but if you’ve got the time to kill its worth watching. Some of the topics covered (in order) are:

The 5GB quota for storing files in the cloud and how users can still synch files between devices when this limit is exceeded
How Mesh uses the feed and enclosure service to synchronise files between clients, and how Microsoft plans to make this process more balanced in the future to stop multiple devices trying to download the same file from just one client.
Ghosting, where users want to synchronise files between clients but not upload to the cloud. Currently this isn’t exposed in the UI but it is built into the service. For example when exceeding the 5GB limit mentioned above.
Performance enhancements. How the Mesh team is looking to increase the intelligence of client downloads, both through downloading chunks and differentials and through using non-busy machines to serve the files.
How they’ve used technologies in Messenger voice + video to get through firewalls
How using the Mesh API, developers will be able to make an application connect across the mesh network using peer to peer synch, and also extending this to Windows and other Microsoft applications. (Messenger is one they mention.)

David Steere and Trevor Robinson: How Live Mesh P2P Syncing Works

Live Mesh Gets Updated – No More UAC? (Updated with full changelog)

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:04:00 GMT

Steve Clayton rightly points out that Live Mesh got an update during the night, which I’ve seen on my three PCs that are in my own Mesh. At the moment there is no official changelog of what’s been updated, but one thing I have noticed is that if you’re using Vista, you no longer have to have UAC turned on, which is great news for a lot of users.

There’s nothing in the Live Mesh Forums at the moment about what else has changed, but as soon as we know, we’ll post it up here. In the meantime, enjoy being UAC free again

Update: I knew I had read about this somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. This announcement was made in the Live Mesh Forum last week which I then read on a twitter update (which is probably why I checked this in the first place). So thanks JamieT for the heads up (even if we forgot about it to start off with )

Update 2: Nadia has just posted on the Live Mesh Forums about what bug fixes have gone through with the recent update. From the forum:

The Live Mesh team has been working hard to fix bugs reported by our Tech Preview users and to address top requested features (such as removing the requirement that UAC be enabled in Windows Vista). Below is a list of the most prominent fixes implemented in the latest Live Mesh release. Thank you for all your great feedback!

Fixes

· Live Mesh is now available in all English-speaking countries (not just the U.S.)

· Index for Desktop Search now works with Live Mesh folders

· Removed the User Account Control (UAC) requirement when installing and using Live Mesh with Windows Vista SP1

· Fixed bug where an underscore in a Hotmail account name returned an “Invalid Hotmail Address” error

· Fixed bug with Silverlight 2 Beta 2 failing to load in Silverlight Media View

· Fixed bug where the notifier tooltip incorrectly indicated that Live Mesh Remote Desktop was unavailable for a computer running in non-admin mode

· Fixed bug where the Live Mesh folder icon was not displayed in the e-mail inviting someone to share a folder

· Fixed one of the bugs that caused Live Mesh to fail to start

· Fixed problem with Live Mesh returning errors when waking from sleep/hibernate

Kudos to the team for these fixes, I see the two main popular ones will be the removal of UAC and the English speaking countries (not just en-US).

Live Mesh desktop wallpapers

Chris — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:51:17 GMT

After pestering Steve Clayton for the Live Mesh wallpaper featured in his recent Sky interview, Steve has now kindly put them online for all to download.

Unfortunately the maximum resolution is only 960x720, so for those of you with large displays it probably won’t be a long-term fixture. Now who do I have to speak with to get some of the Live Mesh polo shirts fetchingly modelled by Dave Treadwell…

Live Mesh promo video shows Mac and Windows Mobile clients (xbox too maybe?)

Chris — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:11:00 GMT

Given Long Zheng's passion for Microsoft promo videos, I thought it only fitting that we pay tribute and post about the Live Mesh one that has appeared on YouTube from the Web2.0 Expo. While I can't offer high-res stills of Mesh bringing animals back to life, there's still a few points you can take away about the high-level vision Microsoft has for Mesh.

At first glance it seems a lot like the generic Microsoft "next-generation" videos that occasionally pop up, full of ideas for the future, most of which will probably never materialise.. Then you remember that actually the products it is showing are already here and Mesh, the link between them all, has just entered initial public testing. Score +1 point for lack of vapourware.

Mobile: say hello to your new Windows Mobile Mesh client. The two screenshots show show before/after when you get a new file synchronised to a Live Mesh folder. Oh it looks good on the HTC Touch Dual too!

There's a Mac in the video! I can't think when the last time I saw one of these make an appearance in a Microsoft promo was. The client for Mac was also demoed at Web 2.0, so its definitely on the way.

Xbox: Not quite sure what the "File Share" aspect relates to as the shared content doesn't tie in with the rest of the video (it looks like they are sharing a screenshot from a game). Still, its not impossible to imagine that Mesh would eventually tie in with Microsoft's gaming platform, just like Windows Live Messenger does already.

Ok so I lied when I said no vapourware. Zune makes an appearance too, synchronising a playlist collection from the Zune device at one location, through to an in-car mp3 player somewhere else. You gotta have dreams though, right?

Perhaps one of the most potent applications that Mesh can offer is the ability to access your media library from anywhere, on any device. While this is definitely achievable now for Vista and Windows Mobile devices, the challenge will be making that available elsewhere: iPod and iPhone applications anybody?

Spot anything else we missed? Let us know!

2 weeks till Mesh - Press invites for demoes go out

Chris — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 03:43:00 GMT

If there was any doubt that Microsoft is planning to launch the Live Mesh Tech Preview at Web 2.0 Expo in just under 2 weeks time, the recent flurry of press invitations to demo events indicates otherwise.

All guesses as to what the logo represents are welcome (I honestly have no idea what a blue orb surrounded by a faux-mobius band represents.)

Of course there's still plenty of time for us to get a few more Mesh posts in before the curtain gets unveiled. Stay tuned!

Live Mesh Tech Preview gets funky Silverlight-esque logo

Chris — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:45:43 GMT

We just can't get enough of Ray Ozzie's latest project Live Mesh, so much so that when we saw what could be the current logo on the dogfood mobile login page, we just had to share. It reminds us of the Silverlight logo thanks to the use of that dazzling blue.

Unfortunately for those who are waiting for an invite to the Technology Preview, we heard there was a queue of softies waiting to get on the internal dogfood program when it was announced at Mix 08, so it could be a while yet.

(Note you can’t login to the mobile site if you can’t login to the main site.)

Microsoft churning out the Ozzie + Mesh PR, so nobody talks about Horizon

Chris — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:38:59 GMT

In case you haven't been following the Microsoft PR Mix08 tour bus, here's the numerous stops they've been making on the subject of Ray Ozzie and Mesh:

The FT churns out a great piece, which you could be forgiven for thinking that Ray Ozzie wrote himself judging by the style and vagueness. Of course he didn't because they actually showed something palpable towards the end, www.mesh.com - "a location where consumers will be able to go to register their devices for the new services and set the levels of information they want to access from different places."
Om Malik turns out a pretty good interview with Ray, though of course the new benchmark is Sarah Lacy so that doesn't necessarily say much. Ray also talks about the enterprise scenario and how Amazon has situated themselves.
Dan Farber talks about FeedSync and how Microsoft is building "a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub."

~~Microsoft PR~~ Dan also mentions what we've been shouting about for a while, that FeedSync is behind all this sharing; "users want to be able to access their data from any device, and for the data to be up-to-date, secure and without duplicate content."

Notice how none of these stories actually talk about what people will do once they have this mesh - remote access? storage? file synchronisation? Mary-Jo Foley filled in some gaps today, talking about Horizon being (amongst other things) a combination of FolderShare and SkyDrive. There's still a lot more to Horizon though, hence the almost deafening amount of noise being drummed up about mesh.

And to think not one of those people talking about mesh actually bothered to question why the url went to preview.mshorizon.com. I guess we'll just have to shout a little louder next time.

Ray Ozzie at Mix08 - Mesh, Horizon and FeedSync

Chris — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:07:00 GMT

So today at Mix08 Ray Ozzie went back to basics. If you compare the headings of his speech to that of his famous memo, there is a lot of common ground. So if you're an exec, how do you keep yourself entertained during these keynotes when repeating the same key concepts but can't start announcing product launches? Well Ozzie seems to have come up with an idea that we approve of, namely "how many unreleased product names / codenames can I fit in".

Mesh was the most obvious one by far yesterday, with several people picking up his constant references to it, see his speech notes linked above. Steve Clayton kindly highlighted the solitary mention of Horizon too, "As this product emerges just over the horizon". Given Steve is now working in this Software as a Service area, his one-line summary is pretty succinct and worth paying attention to: "...tech preview of a cloud sync service coming over the horizon"

So for all of you untrained in reading Ozzie, or conversely if you have done so too many times and actually want to see the goods (like we said, perfectionist), here's the LiveSide summary to what Ozzie said about:

Mesh (mesh.com)

- Device management, for example the reporting of location, centralised configuration and control,
- Unified data management (see below!)
- Unified application management and deployment via the web,

Horizon (mshorizon.com)

- Unified data management
- Synchronisation of files and folders across devices
-"The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch." This should ring some bells - FeedSync anybody?

We often talk about the different "waves" of MSN and Windows Live services. What Ozzie talks about isn't some evolutionary update, this almost falls into the revolutionary category (its not out yet so no definites here). This is a "Wave X" compared to the "Wave 3" we're waiting on for Windows Live. Time to sit up and pay attention.

Let us know if you spotted any other codenames buried in the keynote and we'll add them in!