- Warner Crocker

The Windows Live Mesh team announced today that they have expanded the technical preview of Windows Live Mesh into 3 other countries, Canada, Ireland, and India. This brings the total number of countries where folks can participate up to 7. They include:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Canada
• India
• Ireland

There are still limits on the number of folks who can sign up and also remember this is still a technical preview. Check out more on the Windows Experience Blog.

 

 

- Warner Crocker

If you've been using Live Mesh here is some interesting info. In a blog post titled The potential for Live Mesh is limitless... the Live Mesh team hands out some info on the current limitations for the pre-release version.

As we go through this process, we’re hearing your questions about how many folders and files users can put in Live Mesh today. Here’s a quick summary of the upper bounds we’re testing against ourselves at the moment – we’ll expect these numbers to keep going up with subsequent service updates.

• Size of all contents in a single Live Folder: 10GB (of course there’s still the 5GB quota which limits how much you can synchronize with the Live Desktop)
• Individual file size: 2GB
• Items (file or folders) per Live Folder: 100,000
• Members per Live Folder: 200
• Number of Live Folders per user: 200
• Number of devices per user: 100

This is good info to know. I'm anxious to Live Mesh continue to develop.

Via Paul Thurott's SuperSite

- Warner Crocker

It looks like the Windows Live Mesh Client for Macs is available to download again, but I don't think it is quite working yet. Intriguingly after I downloaded and tried to install the Live Mesh Client it told me the newly downloaded file was older than the one that was already on my Mac, which I had downloaded when it became prematurely available a week or so ago. On running the previous version or the new version I get a request to update or cancel.

According to the download page there is great demand for this, and they are pushing the app out the door before they had planned to, so hopefully this will be up and running soon.

With all of that in mind, here's the link to the download page.

Via LiveSide.

- Warner Crocker

Thanks to a tip from GBM Reader, Chris, it now appears that Windows Live Mesh can now be accessed via the web on your mobile device. The url is http://m.mesh.com. I’m able to access it on the Sprint Mogul and pull down some of my files from any of the folders I’ve created. Again, this is web access only and not a client side app for Mesh. I haven’t seen any publicity on this yet, so we’ll see how it goes. (Click on the thumbnail for a larger view.)

UPDATE: It seems to be working well on the iPod Touch also, which of course means it will work on the iPhone as well. After only a brief trial I’m able to view a few word docs.

 

 

 

- Warner Crocker

If you live in the US and want to give Windows Live Mesh a go, you can join in the fun without an invite, according to an announcement in the Live Mesh Forums. Live Mesh, at the moment, is a sycning solution that allows you to sync data across multiple platforms. Intenational users can also get in on this, if they are willing to change their Windows operating system region and language settings to EN-US.

I’ve been using Live Mesh for awhile now across multiple devices and multiple platforms (using the web option on a Mac) and it has worked very successfully for me so far as a syncing option. That said, I think there is greater promise with Windows Live Mesh than what we currently see offered, once it gets its groove on, and I’m hoping that this comes to be.

Via LiveSide.net

 

- Warner Crocker

Things are moving rapidly here in the final sprint to finish up our renovations and re-open the Wayside Theatre. But as we deal with electricians, sound techs, rehearsals, and the like, we’ve also got the ongoing work of keeping the theatre running to keep us on our toes. Today was one of those days where a couple of solutions I use in my daily work flow came in very handy and sort of saved the day, if not just some precious time.

As a 501–c-3 not-for-profit corporation we apply for and receive a number of grants to support the theatre (our ticket sales only cover 1/2 of our operating costs as a general rule.) One of those granting agencies holds back a portion of the funds until the end of the program and our submission of final reports. That granting agency also requires that we include a mention of their support in our programs and materials, which is only appropriate. This past season, we changed how we acknowledged that generous support, incorporating all such acknowledgments into the design of the artwork on our title page in our printed programs and our ad copy. While still mentioned prominently, it apparently wasn’t too easy for the grant agency’s staffer reviewing our final report to spot it and I got an email that wondered if we had omitted that obligation, and saying this would hold up the release of funds. Yikes!

I was not at the office when this came in, instead I was at the rehearsal hall. So, when I got the call from the office I had an employee scan the title pages of our programs as pdf files into a Windows Live Mesh folder on my desktop. Once that was done I grabbed the pdf files off of the corresponding folder on my Tablet PC and using the stylus, highlighted and marked up the acknowledgment text on each page using BlueBeam PDF Revu. I then sent the files off to the agency via email.

I got a quick reply of thanks, letting me know the funds were now in the mail.

Now, of course, there are other online file syncing solutions that would have given me access to the files, but right now the one I’m using is Windows Live Mesh. It did the job.

The real key here for a circumstance like I just described though is connectivity. Our local town government allows us to use the town council chambers as a rehearsal hall. This saves us a lot of money and aggravation and in and of itself is a very generous donation. But it has only been recently that the town office has installed a WiFi network and allowed us to access it. Lacking that solution I could have tethered up to my Sprint Mogul and connected that way and grabbed the files, but I don’t get a good enough signal in the town hall to make that a reliable method of connecting. But thanks to a WiFi connection, it took very little time to communicate back to the office and get the job done. In fact, I was done in less than the 10 minutes I had given the actors as a break.

Without that connectivity I would have probably left the rehearsal hall to take care of this back at the office. In this circumstance the email that accompanied the files was one I really needed to write rather than delegating it to someone else. So, in addition to getting the funds moving, I figure I saved about a half hour to forty minutes of rehearsal time and also a quick trip during the heat of the day.

- Matt Faulkner

In an e-mail last night there was a notification that Live Mesh had been updated to take care of some bug fixes.  Here at GBM, we have been using Live Mesh for some of the things we do for the site.  Transferring files to each other has become easier, plus having everything in a central file location accessible from a web browser is great!  One thing I have been waiting for is the ability to drag and drop files...  I try it every time (because I forget you can't do it) and I always get an error saying it can't be done... Once that is enabled, it will be much more user friendly for me!

Check out the fixes to Live Mesh below:

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

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

· Index for Desktop Search now works with Live Mesh folders

· 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

 

- Rob Bushway

We've got five exclusive Windows Live Mesh invitations to giveaway to some lucky GBM readers that would like to give it a try. As you might expect with a tech preview, there is a lot of functionality missing right now, but you'll be able to get in early, test it, play with it, and use it more as clients, devices, and syncing functionality are added.

Leave a comment here telling us about your favorite GBM InkShow, Shortcut, or news post. Include your email address in the email field of the comment submission form so we can get in touch with you. We'll pick from among all the submissions 5 lucky winners. Submissions are open until 10:00 PM MST.

By the way, if you want to try out a fully working syncing application across multiple devices and platforms, be sure to also enter our SugarSync contest. Windows Live Mesh is coming and looks really promising, but complete syncing via SugarSync is here now.