Windows Live Mesh tech preview

When Microsoft first unveiled the Live Mesh project I was immediately intrigued. Promising to "put me at the center of my digital world," the website for Mesh had a bunch of pretty graphics explaining a myriad of interesting (albeit sometimes vague) features. From Devices to Live Desktop and shareable folders everything sounded pretty great…that is until some tech pundits started weighing in. One of the first times I remember hearing anyone say anything about Live Mesh was when Kevin Rose, on an episode of TWiT, went through each of the features listed at Mesh.com and wrote them off. For some strange reason that lessened my interest.

Then, this week, I decided to go ahead and finally give Live Mesh a shot. I had originally signed up for the tech preview before everyone started bashing, but after I was notified that I had finally received my invitation to come try the service out my interest had waned significantly. I was concerned that everything would take too long to setup and manage, that the feature set would be limited because this was technically a beta, and that the application might be difficult to use at such an early stage. I have to say on all three fronts I was wrong.

Interacting with Live Mesh doesn’t start with an application installer as you might expect. Instead, it starts with you logging into your Windows Live account at Mesh.com. Here you’ll see all of the devices currently on your mesh as well as your Live Desktop. You can access each of the devices in a nice rotating circle sort of UI, and it’s easy to tell which devices are online and offline (offline devices are grayed out). As you select each device a window comes up with some of its information including whether or not the device is up-to-date with file synchronization, an options menu removing or renaming the device, and most importantly an orange button that says Connect. If you click the connect button and the device is online you can access the device via a remote desktop application. There is, however, one other button on the Mesh.com interface that I forgot to mention – a big orange Add Device button.

When you click Add Device you are at long last prompted to install some software on your computer. You get a sleek blue Mesh application which, among other things, enables the device to be connected to remotely via the connect feature. From the application you can also see which devices are online and connect to them, plus you can access your Live Desktop and the folders it holds. This can be done from any of your Mesh devices of course. So for instance, say you receive a file from someone at work but you really want to look at it later when you’re at home. As long as both devices are setup on your Mesh you can just create a new folder from your Live Desktop, drop your files into it, and it’ll be waiting for you at home when you get there. The Mesh application on your desktop will also give you a news feed of all of the files that have been added recently, providing direct download links for each, which is nice.

Right now you can only add devices to your Mesh that are either Windows XP or Vista PCs, but in the future they’re promising support for Macs as well as mobile devices. Being able to share files as well as connect to any of my devices instantly over the cloud is very appealing to me, and it’s all very easy and intuitive to manage and setup. Just install the application on a device and you can start sharing and connecting immediately. So far the tech preview is free and I’m hoping that’s price point won’t change in the future. As a free service Mesh absolutely rocks, and if you’re using more than one (Windows, for now) computer you should sign up as soon as possible.

(Note: You can click the images in this post to see larger versions of the Mesh interface)

Juno19

dmkemick

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