Live Mesh Tech Preview

Following a successful but limited trial (tech preview) , Microsoft have extended Live Mesh to a wider trial, removing the waiting list for US and UK trial user .
Live mesh allows users to create a mesh (or collection of devices) and then synchronize folders across all (or selected) devices. Ensuring that you always have the latest version of a file or folder wherever you connect. At the moment live mesh only supports xp/vista based devices, (mac and mobile devices are planned). The mac client in particular is rumored to very close to completion, one rumor goes as far as saying that a version was recently posted on the Microsoft website, but later removed.

Live desktop is a web based interface that allows you to access your (synchronized) shared files and folders over the internet. You can choose to keep these private or share them with friends. Live desktop also shows you a list of your devices indicating which are currently online, and giving you the ability to remotely control those devices.

Both Live Mesh and Live Desktop are based around not only synchronizations but also security,
and as part of the Microsoft live family integrates with existing Microsoft live accounts.

For those of us with growing number of devices and personal networks or small businesses's its the ideal way to keep you at the centre of your digital world and ensure that the information that matters to you is seamlessly and consistently up to date wherever you happen to be.



I saw this technology demo'ed by Steve Clayton of Microsoft at thinking digital, back in May
and it look fantastic. The tech preview has certainly been no less impressive.

For those of us with both macs and pcs or even just a desktops , laptop and a mobile, it will certainly take the pain out of keeping versions of files consistent across those devices. Add to that the fact that you can remotely take a file from your camera in the office, sync it to your home pc, then remotely control the home pc to push it to a wireless photo frame in your living room, and you'll get an idea of the power of the mesh.

But i can't help wondering if this is all coming a little late. I'm already using on line services for my email, contacts, calendars, bookmarking, and file sharing, this allow me to keep my files online, so they are always up to date and available wherever i connect . So the question for me is, how much of a benefit is it to have this all in one place? and does that merit persuading all my friends that share this data to move from those services that where already using to live mesh?

User generated mash-ups in the Browser?

Since the term web 2.0 was coined by tim o'rielly, we've become more and more used to the idea of mash ups. Up until know though, mash ups were mainly thought as a server side technology. The web developer would write the code into the page and the user would see the results. However Aka Raskin and the guys over at Mozilla labs have applied the same logic to the browser itself, allowing the user to write a mash up, in simple language, in the browser as they go.

Ubiquity, is a firefox plug its available for download now, from the mozilla labs site. The developers describe Ubiquity as "an experiment into connecting the Web with language, in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. "


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

magnolia.2 announced

Working in IT, i work on a variety of different machines, both mac and pc, in the office and at home, at my desk and at other peoples desks. So social bookmarks really are a must have for me, by storing all of my bookmarks online i have access to them wherever i can get the internet. Not only that but as i have added keywords or tags to all of my bookmarks i can also search them, so finding a bookmark is a lot easier that scrolling threw an endless list.

There are a lot of social bookmarking sites out there, but my preferred option is ma.gnolia Its certainly not the biggest, but it is fast, reliable, easy to use and contains all the key features i want, its searchable and scalable, it supports friends (contacts) as well as user groups it allows public and private bookmarking, it plays well with other allows import and exports, works with other social networks like facebook and is based on industry standards, it supports signing in with open ids.

So if i am so happy with ma.gnolia already, why a i excite that Ma.gnolia are kicking off development of Ma.gnolia 2 (or M2 for short).

Well, for one, magnolia is about 3 years old now and they learned quite in that time, so having the opportunity to produce a ground-up rewrite means thay can re-creating features we love today, but also correct some of the areas that didn't work as well as they would have liked. But even more significant, M2 will be an open source project that can be downloaded to remix and run as your own. So its likely that there will be even more great stuff built on it in the future

For any further details, stay tuned to the Ma.gnolia blog, or check out http://ma.gnolia.org/.

Photosynth Launches

A little while ago I talked about microsoft live lab's astounding photosynth technology. This is a technology based on silverlight that allows you to create virtual environemts from collections of still photographs. At that time this was only available as a demo to view some pre built environments however, the full (and free) version launched today.

Simply upload a selection of images and photosynth will do the rest to stitch them together and make them navigatable. As high numbers of high resolution images are required you are going to need a decent internet connection and even then its likely to take a while, but believe me its worth the wait. A standard use account allows up to 20Gb of server space so you should be able to upload quite a lot and the more you upload the better the results.

This truly is one of the most amazing technologies i have seen for a while, however there are some issues, at this time only Windows Xp and Vista are supported, and i have had a couple of blue screens of death while playing with it (which is very rare for xp).

zipping it up

I just went to submitted a file to a flash showcase, one of the requirements was to send a zipped file containing the original fla (the wording document containing the editable animation) my first reaction was to think whats the point of zipping a file thats only a couple of hundred k, but i guess some complex files may be alot bigger so it sort of made sense. My next thought was guess i'll have to wait until i get to the office and can zip the file on my pc, zip being a pc thing right? then i googled zipping mac files. Looks like i was wrong, while pc users have to purchase a copy of something like winzip, its built right into the mac tiger and above. All you do is select a file or collection of files, click ctrl and select compress...instant zip file. I am so loving my mac again.