Ooh. Now this is pretty. Microsoft Max is pretty much the first application I’ve seen that uses Windows Presentation Foundation. Apart from some of the effects in Vista (which I’m no longer running) I was keen to see what imaginative interface ideas Microsoft would come up with start tapping into all that GPU power.
Well Max, which requires .NET 3.0 RC1, is packed full of prettiness. Transparency galore, Max provides some lovely redering for RSS feeds. They’re made to look like a newspaper (see recent menori postings in the screenshot above). Very nice indeed. Although I am inclined to say that my Mac has performed these ‘pretty’ UI functions for about 3 years now.
Max was covered on TechCrunch a few weeks backbut what I didn’t learn from the article is what it’s actually for. My rudimentary analysis leads me to believe that Max is a peer-to-peer photo sharing application. Now this would explain all of the prettiness. What pure Web applications can deliver this level of prettiness? Well, I’m sure they will do shortly, afterall you’ve only got to look at what Adobe is doing with Flex. But that said Max is pretty in a kind of ‘Quicksilver for Mac’ pretty way. You’ll need to download Quicksilver… you need to download Quicksilver.
Anyway, Max has not blown my PC up, nor has .NET 3.0 RC1. I don’t know how long Max will stay on my PC, but for now I’m having fun seeing what my friends’ feeds look like in it.
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http://www.nakedcleaner.com/index.php/2005/10/15/microsoft-max/
Agreed though it’s moved on since then, but it’s been 12 months, without a ‘real’ release.
Are Microsoft stuck in the Google style perpetual beta?
I only got interested in Max once the RSS reader arrived though. No one out there I know has installed Max (not even you as I seem to remember) and tried it for any length of time. The chrome makes it look like Vista and it behaves like Vista so I’m assuming we wont see a release until Vista is out. And bearing in mind that it runs on .NET 3.0 RC1 I’d hazard a guess that it isn’t going to be released until that goes gold.
You gotta try this stuff. It’s not enough just to comment.
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