Microsoft Live Mesh for Mac

Live Mesh Beta is one of several online storage services from Microsoft. This beta web service offers 5GB of free online storage. Files are accessible both through a web interface and client software. Until recently it only provided client software for Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Recently, however, Microsoft added client software for its Windows Mobile smartphone platform and Mac OS X.

The Mac client beta software is available from Mesh.com. Although it is a public beta, Microsoft is limiting its release to the US and the UK and is also limiting the number of clients it is making available during this beta test period. You can follow the project's progress on the Live Mesh blog.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Live Mesh Mac client only works with Leopard.

The screenshot above is just a wider view of the Add Device window. Here you can see the Live Mesh entry screen and the two defined devies for my account at this point (a netbook running Windows XP and a Windows Mobile smartphone).

The Live Mesh Mac client comes packaged in a conventional DMG file.

You can also see that installation is also conventional: Just drag the Live Mesh app over to the Applications folder in the window.

You need some kind of Microsoft ID. I used the older Hotmail ID name format as shown in the example.

The default personalized computer name is pretty generic. So, I changed it from "Todd Ogasawara's Computer" to "MacBook" (also generic but more meaningful to me).

A Live Mesh folder is created locally on the Mac. This is synched to the cloud (Live Mesh web service). And, as you can see from the tips in the screenshot above, it can be shared by an individual person with multiple computers as well as multiple people.

This pull-down menu is placed next to the other items on the right side of my status bar. You can see the Evernote, Time Machine, and Sync icons next to the Live Mesh icon. The Images and Presentations folders under my name in the menu are Live Mesh folders that I previously created. The View Live Mesh News in the menu is really a personal service log. It should what I've done with Live Mesh in terms of creating folders, adding files, etc.

You can see here that MacBook is now a defined device in my Live Mesh account.

The new folder menu above shows how I created a new Live Mesh sync folder on my MacBook. I arbitrarily named it MeshDocuments to help me quickly identify it as associated with my Live Mesh account. You can also see here that other defined Live Mesh devices can be designated as synchronized with this Live Mesh folder. Devices that are currently online are synchronized over a network connection. Offline devices are synchronized the next time I login to my Live Mesh account on those devices.

One of the big problems with the Live Mesh log (it calls it News) is that it places a timestamp on an action but does not include the data, just the time of day. This makes the news log nearly useless. The document seen in the screenshot above was added at 8:05am about six months ago.

The service works fine if everything is configured correctly from the start on any given device. Problems start showing up if it is now, however. For example, my Windows Mobile smartphone created two synced folders with the same name. And, each was synced to the same folder in system memory instead of flash memory. I was also unable to renamed a folder from the Live Mesh web desktop.

An important thing to note is that you really want to install the Live Mesh client if you plan to sync multiple files during a session. The Live Mesh web desktop only works with a single file at a time for upload or download. On the positive side, the Live Mesh Mac client makes the process of copying files to and from the Live Mesh local folder transparent. Any file transfer delay is masked because the folder actually exists on the local hard disk (or SSD on a Mac Air) with file synching taking place in the background.

Personally, I've found Live Mesh very useful now that I can use it on a Windows PC as well as my Macs. This is especially important for me since I started using Windows XP a lot more in the past few months since getting an Asus Eee PC 1000H netbook for better mobility (compared to my MacBook which is twice as heavy).

I'd like to see a number of fixes (including adding dates to the transaction log). But, the service is useful and free. So, I plan to continue using it in my mixed computing environment.