Microsoft Codename "Max"

Create beautiful albums

As a digital photography enthusiast, I’m really excited about this!

Microsoft has a new product just for folks like me.  The current codename for the product is “Max”. 

Did I say product?  Wrong.  It’s not a product;  It’s an “experience”.  (<sniff>.. I smell marketing.  Bleah…)

Seriously though, it sounds a lot like FlickR or other online photo sharing… but it claims to have a new, cool interface built on WinFX

Sounds to me like it’s worth a good long look!

For more informaton, here is the Max site.

Download Max here.

 

Have you tried it?  What do you think?

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UPDATE: I'm playing with it now.   Here are a couple of notes..

1.  It's not like Flickr at all.  I was way off.  You have to install it (and the installation requires and does the installation of WinFX Beta 2 as well), and then sign in using your Passport account.  What happens is, you create these cool "lists", which are your photo albums... and there are several (well, three) ways to display your pictures:

  • Thumbnail - just picture after picture one at a time in the viewing window
  • Album - It does some cool photo-album-esque arranging on the page.. like pages out of a scrapbook.  And the pages are interactive... you full-page a picture by clicking on it's little part of the photo album page
  • Mantle - Similar to Album, you have multiple pictures on a "page", but in this case, they're arranged tilted and ordered in 3-D... kinda like you would see framed pictures sitting on your fireplace mantle.  Again, you click on an image to bring it to full-page.  Clicking it again brings back the mantle look.

2.  What about sharing?  Well.. that's something I haven't tried yet.  I need one of my family members (Dad?  PaulCarl?  Are you reading this?) I sent the installation link to to actually install it so I can share these lists with them.  Apparently once they have it installed, I can share my lists with them, and the photos will be sent to their computer for their own viewing.  Later they can delete them if they're taking up space.  (And according to the help (which is all coming off the Max team blog, by the way), space is something that Max needs a lot of.).

3.  It looks and feels a lot like Windows Vista!  The graphics are smooth, glossy (at least on my computer), the buttons are animated, and the way it twists and bends the images is really amazing.  If you want a good idea of what Windows Vista looks and feels like, play around with Max.

Give it a go!  If you want, share your list with me.  Contact me and let me know you're interested, and what your email address is, and I'll email you my Passport identity to use.