Preview: Live Mesh for Mac

I’ve been a huge fan of Dropbox, a web disk service which allows you to share and sync files and folders between multiple computers, including Macs, Windows and Linux. It’s been a great free alternative for Apple’s quite pricey MobileMe service but it’s offering only 2GB of space which tends to run out pretty quickly. Now Microsoft has stepped up with it’s new Live Mesh service, offering 5GB of disk space for free, web interface to browse files and also a desktop client for Windows PCs and Macs (Windows Mobile support is coming).

I installed the tech preview version of the Mesh Mac client (v 0.9.3424) on my MacBook Pro without any hassle. I created a new folder from the web browser interface and set it to sync to my Mac whenever files are updated. This resulted a folder to be created on my Leopard desktop so everything seemed to be working fine.

Now I was ready to dwell more into the Mesh client for Mac. Client lets me to create a new Mesh folder from the tray menu and save it anywhere I want on my Mac, or I can choose existing folder to be added to Mesh.

As you see from the picture above, when ever I open Mesh shared folder Live Mesh window is also launched. It provides change-log, synchronization options and lets you invite people to share the folder. Syncing options are something that Dropbox doesn’t yet offer so points for Live Mesh.

From the web interface I can actually preview the media files I have in my Mesh folders, but this feature requires Silverlight, Microsoft’s “Flash” plug-in, to be installed for the web browser. But even without the Silverlight plug-in, web interface works fine on Safari and Firefox so thumbs up for that.

I noticed that web interface shows more broader syncing options than the client but unfortunately they are grayed out. I guess this is why they call the Mac client a tech preview version. Hopefully these features will be enabled soon.

Overall I’m quite happy with the Live Mesh but I will need to do some further experimenting before I’m ready to move away from Dropbox. For someone who hasn’t yet signed up for Dropbox or MobileMe, I would definitely recommend trying out Live Mesh.