My Digital Life

I’ve been using Mesh on my PC’s for a while now, it’s hard to say just how useful it it having my documents and files available where ever I am.  It’s one of those things that you don’t realise you need until you have it!

With the release of the Mac and Windows Mobile CTP’s this week, I’ve been thinking a bit more about how to use Mesh more.  One obvious gap is my iPhone.  It’s a device that I carry with me more or less everywhere, but the one device I can’t use with Mesh.

It wasn’t until I watched the Mesh on Mac video over on on10 over lunch that I thought about using the mesh mobile interface that’s available on m.mesh.com.  Having tried it out I have to say that it works really well. 

From the mobile site you can access all of the folders and content that you have synced with your Mesh Desktop.  You can also read all of the associated news and updates and manage the membership of those folders. 

The iPhone will open and render many of the typical doc types (Images, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF etc), but won’t unfortunately let you open and listen to MP3 files that you may have there.  It was worth a try I guess!

Ages ago when Live Mesh was first announced I watched Ori Amiga’s demo on Channel 9 that showed not just the File sharing aspects of Mesh, but how it could be used for applications.  It really impressed me and being a bit of a petrolhead one of the first apps I thought about was something for cars.  Syncing Music of course, but also SatNav info or settings and diagnostics.

Good news is, I’m not mad and Ori had the same idea!  Channel 9 have just posted up a video of a ‘MeshMobile’ solution they’ve been building.  Take a look for yourself, but I think it’s a great idea.  It’ll be interesting to see whether anyone picks this up and starts building products.  With small, low cost, Atom based computers now commonplace it shouldn’t be too hard - as Ori has proved!

Ori Amiga: Mesh Mobile

After a couple of false starts the Mesh team have just released the Community Tech Preview of the Mesh client.

I’ve just installed it on my Macbook here and at all works very well indeed.  Once signed in you can add and sync your Meshed folders easily and get to all the same docs and files.  Good stuff!

The only thing that doesn’t seem to work (though I’ve not tried to hard I have to admit) is the remote control functionality - controlling other device from the mac at least.  Still, that’s not too important and it’ll be so handy to have all my Meshed folders available on my Mac.

To get the client head over to the Mesh site on your Mac and follow the usual process for adding a device.  It might be worth hurrying though, I beleive that the Mac CTP has a limited number of places for now.

I’ve just read through the latest posting over on the Engineering Windows 7 blog, this time a follow up post on Desktop Search.  Reading though the posts on there I keep thinking about just how good blogs can be when used properly.

In that blog the product team are able to talk about not only the product itself, but also the ‘why’ aspects of the design decisions they’re making.   I’m not sure that’s ever been visible before outside the usual marketing pitches.  For me it’s fascinating reading - but then I am a bit geeky.

I’ve been trying hard to increase the visibility and transparency of the design decisions made during work here.  It’s not always obvious to the customer or end users, and making the reasoning behind your decisions available should make for more open discussions and hopefully a better product and happier customers.  I think there’s a lot to be learnt from MS and Windows 7 teams approach.

Since T-Mobile launched the first Google Android based phone a few weeks ago I’ve read a few good pieces about the both the phone itself and the overall platform.  I find it interesting that pretty much all the articles and blogs compare Android directly with the iPhone.  From what I’ve seen it’s more an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. 

I’m sure some of this is due to the current iPhone and Apple buzz, but I don’t think the WM comparison is something we can ignore.  For one thing Android is a platform rather than a ‘product’.  Where as the iPhone is a complete product - hardware, OS, applications and services, Android is very similar to Windows Mobile in that its a platform you can adopt for your hardware or apps. 

It strikes me that Android is a lot like Chome in that I imagine its seen as a vehicle for the delivery of Googles cloud services.  Although I don’t think Google have really chased the Enterprise market in the past they seem to be building up this side of their business, putting in place the building blocks they will need to move in and squash MS.  There’s a lot of money to be made in the enterprise email and office apps market and Google seem to be chasing that cash with a bit more vigor these days.

Googles enterprise email offerings are very competitive.  On price alone they are hard to ignore.  You loose some of the functionality you get with something like Exchange and Outlook, but especially in todays market, it does put you in a place where you start wondering about whether the functionality is worth the extra cost. 

One gap in the email offering seems to be mobile services.  Services like Blackberry and WM push mail are ubiquitous in business today and will be important for business adoption.  Sure there’s a mobile GoogleMail site, and a client for Blackberry but having their own platform out there that can do push mail, run the core Google apps and provide a platform for third party apps is a very attractive piece of the overall solution.

The fact that few articles are comparing Andoid to WM really surprises me.  And if I was a WM product manager I’d be both happy and worried about that.  Happy because the market seems to be pitching Android against Apple.  Worried because no one is talking about my product.

Edit:  I just spotted a great review of the T-Mobile G1 and Android over on Engadget that gives a good description of Androids integration with the Google cloud.

Today MS have released Silverlight 2.0 out of beta.  Great news for me as I can now get it rolled out at work and get people trying out things like PhotoSynth and DeepZoom (we can’t really deploy betas!).  I’m really looking forward to seeing how people might use them. 

The installation is here and is available for PC and Mac and supports IE, Firefox and Google Chrome. 

An interesting note from the release material is that it seems like Apple are blocking a release for iPhone… I guess it gets in the way of their own plans?  What with Silverlight on its way to Windows Mobile and Nokia, and WM Mesh clients on their way too, I’m going to feel a little left out with my iPhone.

Given MS’s current marketing campaign if I were them I’d be tempted to build iPhone compatible clients anyway.  Then I’d show them working as much as possible and let Apple publicly deny them to users…

With all the recent virtualisation launches from MS (App-V 4.5 and Hyper-V Server 2008) I’ve been doing a bit more reading on the subject over the last few days.  I’ve always used various flavours of VMWare in the past so I thought I’d better catch up with whats going on on the MS side of the world.  There’s quite a bit of good info out there, but this caught my eye so I thought I’d pass it on.

Its a collection of four online elearning clinics on the the MS virualisation products.  Obviously they’re not at detailed as proper training courses, but they look like a decent overview to see what the products are all about.  Not bad for free :)

Included are:
Clinic 5935: Introducing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008
Clinic 6334: Exploring Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Clinic 6335: Exploring Microsoft Application Virtualization
Clinic 6336: Exploring Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008

Link:
https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=228501

I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while since I read about it in Wired.  Better Place is a company formed by ex-SAP product chief Shai Agassi, it’s mission is to end the worlds dependence on fossil fuels for transport.  No small objectives there then. 

To be honest I’d never heard of better place until a few months ago.  I came across it while I was doing some reading into alternative fuels, and it struck me as a fantastic idea.  The Wired gives a much better overview than I could, but in short Better Place proposes to build whole new infrastructures for the use of electric cars and vehicles.  To help achieve this Shai has re-thought the business model we use for buying cars and fuel. 

Cars are offered at a discount, subsidised by the energy companies in the same way as mobile phone companies subsidise handsets.  As a customer you subscribe to a monthly energy tariff as you would a mobile phone.  The phone becomes a car, and the cell stations become recharging points. 

With Better Place and the energy companies building the network of charging points and providing a standardised battery technology, the car makers can concentrate of building cars to make use of that infrastructure. 

They’ve already got Israel and Denmark lined up, and Renault/Nissan designing and building cars.  Take a read through the Wired article and see what you think.  It’s an idea that could change the world.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed a crop of new Internet based, and digitally published magazines like Road and Drivers Republic.  Being a bit of a petrolhead generally new car websites are a good thing… but for some reason these new online magazines haven’t really clicked with me and I’ve not really been sure why. 

It hit me earlier that it’s not the content that I don’t like - most of it is very good, its the format.  In most cases either the whole magazine or individual articles are presented in what are essentially glorified PDF files.  For me at least that format just isn’t nice to use.  What works in print doesn’t necessarily translate into digital media.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d rather have articles published in a blog like format - something I can subscribe to, search etc.  in my view Car magazine does a much better job.  Sure the PDF style approach has its purpose, and I can see the benefits for the publishers, but I don’t think it works for publishing content online.

On the plus side, it’s great to see such good content being available for free.  Drivers Republic in particular has some fantastic features and it’ll be interesting to see how it develops over time.