Liveside have continued their mining for information from the WindowsLivePreview.com website and have discovered some new images and information about Windows Live Sync, the replacement application to Live Mesh.
From the screenshot above its clear to see how this has taken Live Mesh technologies and incorporated them into a new application with a more informative UI and some new features. The current PC is shown at the top and lets users know if all the folders on the PC are up to date, below this is what a guess is a browser to select a new folder to sync and a link to the new Windows Live Devices service.
In the main area of the application is a list of all the folders currently being shared with this PC and whether they are up to date, it appears that if a folder is not up to date then it can be manually told to sync. Extra information can be shown about the folder showing where the folder is in the user’s directory, where and who else this folder is shared with both of which can be changed.
At the bottom of the application are the program settings which are shared with this PC, this is a brand new feature for Sync. This part of the application allows applications settings, for example in Internet Explorer this is favourites, across all of a user’s connected PCs which should make for a seamless use of PCs. Liveside are reporting that currently its only Internet Explorer and Office that can have their settings shared but the hope is that many more applications will soon make use of this features possible through an API. I can think of a few great uses of this, like having the same set of wallpapers on all my PCs without having to sync them and set them as the wallpaper slideshow manually.
In terms of the service side of Windows Live Sync the Live Desktop of Live Mesh will now become a part of SkyDrive only providing 2GBs of storage for Sync, how this integrates with the other folders in SkyDrive is currently unknown. I hope, like others, that the 2GB limit will quickly be expanded upon or users will be allowed to make use of the full 25GB of SkyDrive storage, you never know SkyDrive might be getting an increase to its storage limit. Current Live Mesh users need to know that when Sync is installed on their PC it will automatically remove Live Mesh from the PC and you will have to set up all the folders you want synced.
As you probably noticed at the top of the Sync window is a “Remote” tab, this uses the Live Mesh technologies to allow remote access to a user’s PCs and it will be possible to do the same remote access from Windows Live Devices in the browser from anywhere in the world.
The Live Mesh technologies can be easily seen in the remote access screenshot as Microsoft have done very little, seemingly, to change the look and feel of the remote experience which is the best way of using the technologies.
I am really looking looking forward to the ability to sync program settings across my PCs however the 2GB limit on Sync doesn’t sound that good, Live Mesh has 5GB. You might also like to know about the future of the Live Framework which was basically a way to access the technology of Live Mesh through the internet for one’s own use in a wide range of ways, well I have been informed that these technologies will be forming part of Messenger Connect.
