Microsoft Max project winding down

Microsoft Max was never all that clear what it was (except for being a demo of new technologies), though as it offered some photo organizational features it did get briefly compared to Picasa.  Back in September, when a new version came out, I gave it a more thorough workout, and was disappointed - finding it slow and cumbersome.

However, just a couple of months later, Microsoft have announced that the project is over, and that the program will be discontinued.  Downloads are already disabled, and soon the ability to share lists of photos will be switched off.

Microsoft Max - of minimal use

Microsoft have released a new version of Microsoft Max, a photo organizer of sorts, so it's getting a fair amount of blog coverage.

Max gives you the ability to produce lists of your photos, which it also calls albums, and then to share these with your friends.  In theory a limited, but usable, set of features.  However, that's not the real purpose of Max - its mostly just a way to showcase some new graphical features that Microsoft are producing, and which will be included in Windows Vista.  To use Max on Windows XP is a huge download (the recommended requirements include "Beverage and snack. The installation may take a while."), and the result is a huge disappointment.

The graphics are superficially slick, but are very slow - presumably that's a reflection of the fact that they make huge demands on the graphics card, and that my card is not state of the art.  However, since displaying photos is a very simple operation, there should be no need for this to be a slow operation on any graphics card.

Working with photos almost universally uses a thumbnail concept.  Max however seems to have failed to grasp one of the most trivial properties of thumbnails - that equal sized photos give equal sized thumbnails.  Max is happy with landscape orientation images - the thumbnails of these are fine, but if an image is portrait orientation, the thumbnail is simply made to be the same height as the landscape thumbnail - which means its area is much smaller than it should be.

The photo sharing concept is also severely limited - instead of sharing in any standard format or via a server based mechanism, sharing simply means that you make the photos available for (secure) peer to peer download by other Max users.

Oh, and the reason why a new version has been released was to add RSS feed reading to the package.  I have no idea who thought that this was an appropriate addition to a photo program, but it currently seems very out of place.  (You could perhaps justify it if it was specialized for the photo RSS feeds produced by Picasa Web Albums or Flickr, and if its own sharing ability was based on such photo feeds, but that does not seem to be the case).

See also: Max disappoints (whose conclusion "Max is not even worth downloading and trying it out." I have to agree with), TechCrunch, David Brunell.