Mesh First Impressions
posted in Technology, Vista, Software |I wanted to post some first impressions playing with the new Microsoft Mesh. Unfortunately I’ve barely been able to use it. Many of my friends I’m sure will complain about the lack of Mac support so far, but for me the lack of Windows support is worse.
It doesn’t work on my Vista machines- for some reason at this point it requires User Account Control (UAC) to be “on” (but of course won’t run on an account that doesn’t have admin privileges. I’m not going to rant too much about this yet since I’m hoping its just because its an early release. But this one is really confusing unless its something some wacko did to try to push UAC (EVIL!) on people. There is really nothing you can do with UAC on that won’t work with it off. Again, I’m hoping this is just one of those wacky bugs that got punted at the last minute for this early release…
It also doesn’t work on Server. So one of the more useful machines for me to sync to- the server box that I keep all my important data on, can’t play. This isn’t a normal “home” scenario, except that Microsoft is trying to push Home Server (I’m not running Home Server, but the install error pertty clearly said XP SP2 and Vista only). Again, I’m hoping this is just early release stuff.
Then one of my XP machines has Firefox as its default browser. The Mesh client bits keep poping URLs, but since Firefox can’t run the ActiveX associated with them, it fails. Here I feel some sympathy with Microsoft. The ideal solution would be if your UI requires Internet Explorer, launch IE directly instead of the machines configured “default browser”. However given the wacky government regulation of Microsoft they would likely get in trouble for doing this sensible thing, and so its yet another aspect that doesn’t really run correctly for me.
So, someday I hope to report on Mesh itself, but its not going to happen yet.