Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

taimurasad — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:10:51 GMT

great tutorial chris :). I have covered this and another scenario where you can synchronize RSS feeds across multiple devices here www.redmondpie.com/take-your-favorites-and-rss-feeds-with-you-using-mesh

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

Chris — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:25:32 GMT

krishna.hari - great spot. looks like its fully working too. Just added a post on it, many thanks for the heads up!

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

krishna.hari — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:54:49 GMT

m.mesh.com mobile website is up . has anyone tried this?

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

rgonzruiz — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:13:00 GMT

@fofa: have you tried installing the Live Mesh client with the -Force command line? It worked for me on my WinXP 64-bit (officially unsupported by the installer)... msftguy.blogspot.com/.../befriending-live-mesh-and-server-2008.html

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

foaf — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:29:53 GMT

@GahGah: "Another idea would be to put your WHS into your Mesh" - this would be the holy grail of file synching for me. I hope they are working on a client for WinServer 2k3 / WHS.

And the reason to skip the Live Desktop synching is because my WHS has 1TB of storage while Live Desktop has 5GBs.

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

Laurent — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:45:21 GMT

Hi,

I write about this scenario the same day!

weblogs.asp.net/.../sync-your-favorites-with-live-mesh.aspx

I also wrote a tutorial to sync VS settings with Live Mesh:

weblogs.asp.net/.../sync-your-visual-studio-settings-with-live-mesh.aspx

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

Chris — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:05:51 GMT

rgonzruiz: really useful comment thanks!

With regards to the uploading of changes only, I seem to recall it being mentioned in the p2p video (link below) as one of the areas they are trying to work on.

www.liveside.net/.../looking-at-the-live-mesh-peer-to-peer-synch.aspx

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

rgonzruiz — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:07:04 GMT

Well, I decided to give this idea a try, and here's my feedback.

I have Firefox 3, and had to do a little analysis before simply choosing a folder to sync with Mesh...

First of all, FF3 doesn't use the bookmarks.html file anymore to store bookmars... It uses the file places.sqllite for this, and because it resides directly on the "...\xxxxx.default" profile folder, you basically need to sync the entire profile folder (which includes extensions and other stuff) to be able to sync your bookmarks (if someone has found another way of just synching the mere places.sqllite file, then please state so).

But then I thought to myself "this is cool, I'll simply have everything synched"... so I decided to sync the entire folder structure when I noticed that there was a file in the "<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\" folder that indicates which profile is the one to be used... (profiles.ini)... So then I decided to sync the Firefox folder ( which looks better in my Mesh Desktop folder list because it appears as "Firefox" instead of "Profiles"....

I have added the "Firefox" folder to my Mesh and everything went fine... after it was completely uploaded, I added the folder to my other computer (backing up the "Firefox" folder on that one, just in case...). After that I waited for it to completely download and proceeded to open Firefox... and alas... everything worked... even the extensions I didn't have on that computer where "imported" and work fine...

There is just 1 problem... I used the browser as usual and surfed a few pages... then I closed firefox and went to the Mesh notifier to see what was going to be uploaded... and here's the bad news: almost 12MB began to get uploaded.... "wth?" I thought... I guess FF simply modified some of is *.sqllite files it uses and I also guess Mesh doesn't simply update the modified delta portion of the files it has to update but instead uploads the entire file again... is this so (can someone confirm)?

This is a big point regarding network use and optimization... even Dropbox states this as being a feature on its intro video (www.getdropbox.com/screencast)

In any case, I guess this has already come up in the wishlist and is something that most probably the mesh team is already planning for...

For the time being I can live with this, as it is very helpful...

Great ideas are spawning with Live Mesh... lets hope they do fix this issue so that it becomes an excellent tool for synching not only documents but also program settings and even programs themselves...

I hope this comment helps others applying this article's idea to their specific needs.

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

Gahgah — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:16:50 GMT

Good idea. But why to leave out the Live Desktop? Think of that scenario:

Working at home with my Desktop PC.

Turnig that off.

At my friends house turning on my laptop.

If i'm right there's noc chance to get the files synched when the device with the newest information is offline, right? So for me it would make sense to include the Live Desktop.

Another idea would be to put your WHS into your Mesh. Then this machine would be always on and could deploy you favourites to all other devices in your cloud!

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

Chris — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:55:03 GMT

Yes the option is only available in the web desktop at the moment, not via the client. Judging by the feedback on the Live Mesh forums the team are aware of the issue though, so hopefully it will be fixed soon.

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

surilamin — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:48:41 GMT

I have upgraded to the latest version (.9.3130.2) of Mesh (even uninstalled and reinstalled just to be sure), and I do not have the option of not syncing to the Live Desktop. Has anybody else experienced this problem?

re: Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

tophtucker — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:16:20 GMT

Nice! Simple but effective.