Gallery

Cloud design

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 16:53

Tom Arah is impressed by Microsoft Live Mesh, and wonders just what Cloud-based computing could mean for the designer.

Acrobat.com offers a great deal, but it doesn't handle ongoing design work beyond basic storage: you can't even manage your files in folders. I'd hoped that the recently launched Creative Suite 4 might save and download native files to and from Acrobat.com, but that was over-optimistic - most CS4 apps did get the ability to export PDFs directly to Acrobat.com, but not online native file handling.

Live Mesh

Perhaps surprisingly, the best solution I've come across so far is Microsoft's Live Mesh (www.mesh.com), a beta service that also offers 5GB of free space, but with automatic data synchronisation. Synchronisation is especially crucial to designers, because manually copying all the files involved in a complex design project makes mistakes almost inevitable. Setting all the most recent versions of files in certain folders to be automatically copied to online storage makes sure all the files you need - CDR and PSD, as well as EPS and TIFF - will be there when you need them. And by only copying the changed files, synchronisation minimises waiting due to the horribly slow upload speed of asynchronous broadband connections.

Setting up Live Mesh couldn't be easier - all you need is an internet connection and a Microsoft Live ID. Once signed in, add your current device to your "mesh" by clicking the Add Device icon and installing the Live Mesh software. Choosing which files to synchronise is just as easy: right-click a folder in Windows Explorer, click on the new "Add folder to Live Mesh" command, give it a name and click OK. Within a minute or so, you'll see the Live Mesh icon in your System Tray spinning, which signifies that your files are being uploaded to your online storage space or Live Desktop. Delete a file from your folder and, again, Live Desktop will update itself a minute or so later.

Now that your folder is mirrored on Live Desktop you can open it - either via your PC's System Tray icon or from any internet-connected system by visiting the mesh.com website - then quickly download or upload files via a reasonably attractive file manager. You can invite other users to share your folders (although not individual files) by email and, by switching to a Silverlight-based Media view, you can even remotely play back music and photos.

But here's the real payoff - add a second device to your Mesh with a folder of the same name as an existing folder in your Live Desktop, and Live Mesh spots the match and asks you whether to synchronise files between them. Synchronisation isn't just between one PC and Live Desktop, but through the Live Desktop between all of the devices in your Mesh. Better yet, Live Desktop acts as a central repository, so that synchronisation doesn't depend on all devices being present simultaneously - each can update when it has an internet connection. If this difference between one-way and n-way synchronisation sounds dry and technical, in practice it's almost magical. Set up your Mesh correctly and, whatever device you're using, the right files are there waiting for you (even if they were most recently edited elsewhere). And this Cloud-based Mesh doesn't even feel Cloud-based at all, but rather the way that computers ought always to have worked. Why wouldn't your data be where you want it?

The Mesh is indeed a massive advance, but it isn't actually magic: it feels so natural that you soon forget it's there, which is when it can turn around and bite. For one thing, files aren't synchronised when you hit Save, but only when you close them, so if you leave a file open in the office then only an earlier version will be waiting when you get home. Worse still, if next morning you remember to hit Save at work, when you close the file that version will get synchronised to all devices, overwriting any edits you made to the earlier version at home. And make sure not to delete those huge INDD files from your notebook because you don't have InDesign installed on it, or suddenly they'll have gone from all your systems!