Jon Paul Davies

Thinking Digital: 21-23 May 2008

I’m off to the Thinking Digital conference at The Sage Gateshead this time next week. Billed as an ‘event where outstanding individuals gather to take part in an exclusive conversation about technology, ideas and our future’ it’s a great chance to see some of the best speakers the planet has to offer in action. Highlights on offer include:

Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s Software plus Services Lead and all round top bloke, demonstrating some of the coolest new technologies to come out of Redmond, including what’s expected to be a first UK demo of Live Mesh.

The Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Dan Lyons, Senior Editor at Forbes), author of Internet sensation The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, giving his unique, hilarious take on the world of technology, the people who drive it, and the future of media.

Greg Dyke, Chairman of the British Film being interviewed live on stage by Andy Allan, the former CEO of Carlton Television, about management and leadership challenges, as well as his views on the future of media.

World-renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil speaking via stunning Teleportec technology about his groundbreaking work on The Singularity and the point at which computer intelligence will surpass our own, in every form.

Hopefully it should be clear to you that with such a lineup set to appear, I’m more than a little excited to be one of the lucky 400 who gets to attend!

Live Mesh - An Overview

It would be easy to look at Live Mesh as "Remote Desktop for Dummies" or a SkyDrive desktop extension, but dig a little deeper and you will find a platform for device, data and application confluence that provides open access to data models and APIs.

The Live Mesh client experience consists of 2 main parts, a web based Live Desktop and a downloadable client that runs on your OS. Install the client on all the devices you want to add to your mesh and you are granted the ability to share files and data between them. You can remotely control machines too, in a manner that users of LogMeIn will find familiar. The web based Live Desktop is shown as another device on the client, and can be used to store data that is accessible anywhere, event without the client installed. All units are nice to look at; the Live Desktop is a particularly nice bit of engineering, having a look that is not dissimilar to ExtJS build UI.

Ok - So far, so what? It’s a nice looking client that allows you to boot data around your collection of machines. Big deal.

The first thing you should do, is watch Ori Amiga: Programming the Mesh. The scope of this project is absolutely mind bending. The ‘real’ Mesh experience consists of an API with synchronization-ready access to data, devices, application and activity feeds, run anywhere code, viewing data the way YOU want it rather than the way a developer designed it, software plus services architecture without any coding required.

As an experiment, me and a colleague set a folder up with an ASP.NET website in it, hooked it up to the mesh and began collaborating on development. Please re-read that last sentence: We took a desktop application, Visual Studio 2008, and turned it into a collaborative development environment with version tracking and change management over the cloud in about 2 minutes flat. We both edited the same file at the same time, fully expecting one of our changes to be overwritten. Nope. Mesh spotted the clash, and alerted us to choose which version to go with.

As a developer you can choose how much your applications and sites integrate with the mesh. Put more effort in, you get more out obviously. The ability to create code that runs on the web, on a disconnected desktop client that re-syncs itself when re-connected is a future that we can all participate in. I think Microsoft have made real the S+S ideal and done it in a way that shows real consideration and thought into how developers and users truly work.

Also, if anyone has any Live Mesh invites they want to share with other readers, feel free to post in the comments section of this post.