Jan 10

Live Mesh Open to the Public

Posted in: Microsoft, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on July 16, 2008 by CyberNet.

live mesh.jpgMicrosoft has opened the doors of its Live Mesh service so that anyone with a Windows Live ID can immediately start using it. It is only available for users in the US, but the Live Mesh team says that this restriction can easily be circumvented by setting your operating system region and language settings to EN-US:

Signing up for Live Mesh now!

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that we have simplified the signup process for our US customers. We are doubling the upper limit of our technology preview program. Our technology preview is still limited to ensure great performance and experience for our customers. You can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No waiting list at this time!

International Customers

With Live Mesh open to more people in the US, our international friends can join in the fun early as well – with one caveat: you must be willing to change your Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US. Once you do this you will be able to immediately sign in to Live Mesh with a valid Windows Live ID. Please be aware that this may cause other applications that specifically require your native country region and language settings to encounter problems.

Previously Live Mesh was available to about 10,000 testers that had been accepted into the program a few months ago. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft can sustain the onslaught of new accounts that will likely be created, in terms of performance and stability.

What is Live Mesh? It’s basically a file synchronization service that can keep entire folders in sync with each other across remote PC’s (Mac and mobile support coming soon). Plus you’re given 5GB of storage that is used to make files available from anywhere via a web interface. Here’s a tour of Live Mesh (requires Silverlight) for those of you wanting to know more about how it works.

Live Mesh Homepage [via LiveSide]

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Dec 25

Ultimate Software Update Monitor?

Posted in: Freeware, Newly Released, Reviews, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on January 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

I’m still on a quest to find a great software update monitor so that I know when new versions of my favorite apps are released, and I just found a new one that looks promising. To recap we’ve showed you how to create your own software update monitor, reviewed UpdateStar, tried out AppSnap, played with File Hippo’s Update Checker, and gave Secunia PSI a whirl. That’s a lot of different ways to check for updated programs, and now we’ll add SUMo to the list.

This program is like any of the others in that it analyzes what applications you have installed, and checks to see if a newer version is available. I wanted to try it out, but using my primary computer wouldn’t put the program through its paces. Instead I decided to use it on my test machine which I knew was running a lot of outdated software, and the results were rather impressive.

To use SUMo you have to download and install it, let it scan for installed apps, and then hit the Check button to compare your versions with a remote database. My results looked something like this:

SUMo Update Monitor

Out of the 81 programs that I had installed there were 36 of them that were out of date. No, I wasn’t surprised since I hardly ever update the software that is on this machine. But compared to the other applications available I would say that SUMo provided the best results. I did notice it telling me that Flock 1.0.5 was the latest version despite 1.0.6 being released today, but I wasn’t expecting the software to catch on to updates that fast.

One thing that makes me a little hesitant about this program is that it recommended an update to Opera 9.25 telling me that Opera 9.5.9745 was the latest version. It’s not wrong, but Opera 9.5 hasn’t officially been released yet. So it is essentially telling me to upgrade my stable software to a Beta copy. Knowledgeable users will be able to catch things like this, but other people may unknowingly upgrade to software that isn’t ready for prime time.

When you decide that it’s time to update a program you can click the Get Update button, but I’ll forewarn you that it’s not all that helpful. It will take you to a site, such as this one, that gives you links to search for the download on various other download sites. A link to the program’s homepage would be more helpful, but as long as your Google skills are good I think SUMo should work out well for you.

Get SUMo Software Update Monitor
Thanks Jeremy for the tip!

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