Keeping an eye on Windows and other things tech!

New Live Search Homepage Revealed

The Live Search team have just blogged about an update to the main Live Search homepage at http://www.live.com/.

As you can see in the above picture it is a very graphical page now with a high quality picture that not only contains the live search box we have seen in the past but there is also hotspots that you can click on to learn more about the region, object, thing in the photo background.

The new design features background images that will change frequently, augmented with what we call "hotspots." These interactive areas highlight parts of the image and help you explore search results related to the highlighted area. Users who have tested this new home page have found it both engaging and a great place to start a search.

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Update to Windows Live Mesh Released

The Windows Live Mesh team announced in their blog today that they are releasing the latest build for this Tech Preview.

We are making Live Mesh available to more people and we’ve greatly streamlined the sign-up process. We’ve also made a number of general performance improvements.

They continue to improve the general performance of this peer to peer software and offer an expanded audience the opportunity to get in the Technical Preview:

• More capacity: We’ve again raised the limit on the total number of customers we’ll allow to access the Live Mesh Tech Preview. Get ‘em while they’re hot!
• Expanded availability: If your country/region is the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand you can sign up for Live Mesh directly, with no waiting list, by visiting www.mesh.com. We’re limiting the Tech Preview to these countries/regions for now because we want to make sure that all customers have a great experience with Live Mesh, and we’re still in the process of testing the experience for other countries/regions.
• More invites: There is no longer any limit on the number of invitations that Live Mesh customers have for inviting others to the Tech Preview. Invite as many people as you like! (as long as they’re in one of the countries/regions mentioned above, of course.)
• Simplified waiting list: Though we’re not quite ready to accept customers into the Tech Preview from countries/regions other than the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, we have greatly simplified the waiting list process for everyone else. You no longer need to sign up through Microsoft Connect. Instead, simply sign in with your Live ID on www.mesh.com, click Sign Up, and you’ll automatically be notified once Live Mesh is available in your country/region.
• Performance tuning: We’ve continued making a number of back-end performance enhancements, including tuning the P2P synchronization channel.

I recommend you take advantage of the expansion of this preview and grab this software for your computers.  I find it extremely handy to upload some files at work and then go home to find them waiting on my desktop in the synched folder.  Yes, I could put everything on a flash drive and basically do the same thing but this is just one less step in the process – plus I can easily lose my geek sticks!

Related Posts:

• Windows Live Mesh for Everyone!
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