If you've nabbed one of the many Live Mesh invitations floating around the HEXUS.community forums, you may have noticed that Microsoft rolled out a major update over the weekend, bringing the software service up to version 0.9.3103.2.
The update itself provides just a handful of new features and fixes, but one feature in particular, peer-to-peer only sync, has been heavily requested by users and the Live Mesh team has delivered. The peer-to-peer only option will allow users to sync between multiple devices without syncing to the Live Desktop.
The full list of changes is detailed below, and though you should have received the update automatically, you can right click your Live Mesh tray icon and choose "update Live Mesh" to ensure you're running the latest version.
New Features
- Sync Live Mesh folders peer-to-peer only, excluding your Live Desktop. This will make it possible to sync files across your devices (or with devices of other members of a Live Folder) without consuming any storage space or quota in the Live Mesh cloud storage service. For completeness sake, though, we should mention that it’s not a 100% P2P sync – to optimise the sync experience we still use the cloud to store the authoritative metadata for the folder (for example, the file list and change history) and to broker encrypted P2P connections between clients. But the files themselves will not be stored in the cloud. Also, note that only the creator of a Live Mesh folder will have permission to change the cloud sync settings, since all the contents of a Live Mesh folder (no matter which user uploaded them) get charged against the quota of the folder’s creator. We've got some details on how peer communications and sync work up today on Channel 9.
- File conflicts management on the Live Desktop. Pretty much speaks for itself. The same ability to view and resolve conflicting edits to a file that you’ve had in the Windows client is now available on the Live Desktop. Actually, we think it’s an even better experience, since we took the opportunity to streamline the UX when we implemented it for Live Desktop (we’ll bring the same improvements to the client in the future.)
- Added news events for New Live Mesh folder and Delete Live Mesh folder. We’re continuing to tune the news feed to provide the right set of information you need to keep track of what’s happening across your mesh.
Fixes
- Improved performance when syncing files peer-to-peer. David and Trevor get into some of the details of where we found room for improvement in today's video.
- Better coalescing for news events. In non-geek speak, that means we’ll do a better job showing you only one news event when a user makes a bunch of changes in quick succession.
- News performance and scale improvements. Faster and better, new and improved, it slices and dices!
