Live Mesh Fail
This month’s Wired has an article about Ray Ozzie, where they mention Live Mesh:
Then comes a demonstration of Live Mesh, which will allow people to seamlessly synchronize all their information with as many people and places as they want, across as many devices (computer, phone, camera) as they want.
So I installed it. The installation process kicks Vista into a degraded video mode:
While not a deal breaker, this is annoying and kind of broken. The real FAIL moment comes when you try to use the service with Firefox:
So I tried double-clicking on the “notifier” icon in the Vista task bar, but that just takes me back into Firefox with the same failure message.
Ozzie won’t fix Microsoft with products like this. They still do not “get” the Internet — at all. Nothing Microsoft produces for the web feels like a normal part of the Internet. Live Mesh is already a failure.
ActiveX ??!!
Now it’s very obvious why Windows-7 will not come pre-installed with mail client, etc. It will direct you to and feed you on ActiveX until you are dependent upon it.
Same old same old MS. With 90% plus of PC market though, smartphones are where there is less inertia and a more level playing field … how long before smartphones scale up to replace the Personal Computing experience? Not too long … give the iphone a dockable screen and keyboard …
Yeah, they always seem to miss the point slightly, don’t they?
Never mind – you can have most (all?) of what Mesh is supposed to do with Dropbox. Out of the box, it gives you a watched folder called your Dropbox, which it will seamlessly synch into the cloud and onto any other devices that you’re logged into.
It works perfectly and runs everywhere, with any mix of clients – Windows, Mac or Linux – I’m using the 64bit Linux client, for example. There’s also web access, if you don’t have the client installed but need access.
They get the internet too with a lively forum where the Dropbox programmers regularly talk to the community and provide support, a documentation Wiki coming soon, etc…
Comes with 2Gb storage free, too. If you want to have a look, it’s over here:
http://www.getdropbox.com/
It don’t work for them or anything, it’s just a great service!
Weird… You’ll actually find that Microsoft have made sure that this product is supported across the full range of browsers (i.e. I am right now sitting on Shiretoko (Firefox beta), have been using Konqueror on Fedora 10 and have had no problems with it under Safari) and across multiple platforms (currently Windows, mac and Windows Mobile).
Add to that the fact that the whole API (”Live Frameworks”) is REST based and as such can be used from any device that supports HTTP(S) (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd156996.aspx) and you have a system that couldn’t really be more open. The only feature that currently requires Internet Explorer is the web based Remote Desktop (for obvious reasons) and the drag and drop from your machine to the Live Desktop (again, for obvious reasons).
If you got the above screenshot when accessing your normal Live Desktop via mesh.com then I would strongly encourage you to post about it on the forums (which have incredibly active contributors directly from the Live Mesh team) and submit a bug (I’d also submit one about the colour depth) by following the instructions there:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/LiveMesh/threads/
Not everything that Microsoft does is evil, and I think that you’ll find that a lot of the time the people at Microsoft actually do “get” the internet. Don’t forget that this is still a beta product as well…
@nachmore when it works with Firefox, I’ll try it again. The error message in my screen shot tells me to use my Live Mesh notifier. When I do that, however, it launches my default browser — Firefox — and fails with the screen shot shown above. It seems the only way to make this function is to make IE my default browser, which is something I will never do.
Eric, thanks for giving Mesh a try. A few quick comments:
1)Install video issues. There are two parts to the install package, a bunch of per-user stuff and then a “bonus pack” of some enhanced components that require admin rights to install. One of those enhanced components is our high performance remote desktop driver. To get this to work, we have to install it as an actual video driver, and in the process of doing that Vista temporarily turns glass off and then back on again. I’m not sure there’s a way around this when you install a video driver.
2) the Live Desktop components of Live Mesh (what you get at https://www.mesh.com/Web/Desktop.aspx) should all work great with Firefox.
3) the Live Mesh client software you installed on you PC should work fine with Firefox. I just tested with FFox 3 as default browser. I go to the Mesh icon in the system tray, go to the devices tab, find an online device, and click “Connect to device” That launches wlcmstsc.exe which is our Live Remote Desktop host, and it works fine. doesn’t trigger the browser at all
4) if you want to do remote desktop from within a web browser (without using the client software at all), that is ActiveX based today and works only in IE. Had to start somewhere….but our goal is broader support in time
5) as for rest of Live Mesh client software working with FFox as default, I haven’t seen any issues yet. Please do post to the forums if you have specific things that don’t work.
-Jeremy Mazner (on the Mesh team)
Just had the same issue. Too much of a pain. Will find a service that supports Firefox. Anyone have any suggestions?