Microsoft Max Adds Feed Reading
Microsoft has released the latest version of Max, the product with the strange name that tells you nothing of their plans for it. Max seems like a piece of software that just doesn’t fit with anything else Microsoft does, but does a great job at it. Previously, Max presented a really great way to see your photos, taking advantage of new technologies to achieve some great graphical results. In that way, it was more of a technology demonstration than actual software.
The new version of Max adds feed reading. It looks great, complete with a newspaper-style layout that allows you to see most of the new stories in an RSS feed in one quick view:
One problem: As a technology demonstration, it doesn’t make good use of the technologies now present in Windows. If you have IE7, whether in Windows XP or Vista, you’ve got a common RSS feed list available to all programs on your system, and Microsoft has been trying to encourage software developers to use it, since it is supposedly quite easy to program. If so, why the hell doesn’t Max use it?
Anyway, a few more screenshots of Max:
Home screen:
Album view:
Annotating photos:
3D photo view:
Photo sharing:
If you like what you see, download it now. Max is beta software for Windows XP SP2 only, meaning it won’t allow itself to run under Windows Vista. It’s a 54 megabyte installer, mostly because it contains version 3 of the .NET Framework (itself a beta). Read more at Niall Kennedy and the Max team blog.
One interesting thing: Max appears to come preloaded with the MSN Filter blogs subscribed. I wonder if that is part of Microsoft’s strategy. Will Vista come presubscribed to the Filter blogs? More on them in these earlier articles: (1) (2) (3), and you might also be interested in my previous article on Max.
Hi everybody!
Can the open source software movement defeat (or severely cripple) Microsoft in the marketplace? Thank you
Comment by camera-digital | September 20, 2006