I’ve had a day to play with Live Mesh and here are some things I’ve noticed.
Installation
- Aside from hard drive IO and a LiveMesh.exe process there was no feedback about installation progress. I’m assuming this will be corrected in the final release.
- There is no install wizard! Hurray! Feedback came from a toast window right above the SysTray. At first this was disconcerting, but I am absolutely thrilled. Installers on Windows are full of stop points and friction. This was a true “one-click” installer.
By the way, Live Mesh is installed to Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Live Mesh. - While “Configuring Live Mesh Updates” my screen went black several times. It felt like a UAC prompt was due at any moment. Then I realized this was an XP machine. Huh?
- The installation gave me an unknown error on my Vista 32 machine. It appears to be working fine, however.
- This one hurts. Why is there no support for Windows Home Server? I know it’s just an MSI operating system check that I could bypass but that’s just silly. Synchronization of files from various machines to share folders on the server is a no-brainer. Perhaps they are working on a WHS plugin…
Client Application
- This new trend kills me. It’s starting to pop up all over the web. Must I click three checkboxes to have an application launch without any prompts?
- I chose a folder to synch and within seconds it appeared on my web-based Live Desktop. The entire Live Desktop experience is very well conceived.
- Adding a second computer automatically started synching all shared folders to my desktop. Just like the installer, Live Mesh made an assumption about where I would want the folder and ran with it. Personally, I didn’t want the folder on my desktop, but switching the location was intuitive and painless. I can almost hear the Live Mesh product managers chanting “Convention over Configuration” and Sensible Defaults.”
- Memory usage is high. Moe.exe and MoeMonitor.exe take a combined 100 M.
The client application is written partially in .NET. Reflector uncovered a few interesting details.
- Lots of references to Mac support.
- The logging code appears to have a bug. It logs to the GacBase directory instead of the Logs directory.
- Bummer. The UI isn’t done with WPF.