Microsoft Codename Max is a photo sharing/viewing tool. It allows you to compile lists (groups) of photos and share them using your .NET Passport. One belief currently floating around is that Microsoft will use Max as a replacement of the Windows Picture and Fax viewer in Windows Vista. There is another reason why this beta is important. It is the first application to be written under the new Vista UI Guidelines. Meaning more verbose and user friendly dialogs, use of Segoe UI as the main font, etc.

Because Max runs on WinFX, you have to install the beta 2 of WinFX. Once you have it installed, you have to sign in to your .NET Passport in order to make use of the sharing part of Max. Max will send you an e-mail to confirm that it is really you who is signing in, and not someone who has stolen your info (though if someone has managed to lift your info, you have much more serious things to worry about). Once you have signed in, you are free to create and share all the lists you want. On the home page, there is a box with “News from the Team”, and another box with 3 buttons (pictured below): Create and Share a List, Other People’s Lists, and My Lists.

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When you click on Create a List, you are given the first seven folders in My Pictures, and a button that says Browse All. When you click it, you are then presented with your My Pictures folder. From here you can add a picture to the list by clicking on it, navigate to a folder by clicking the folder, or go up one level by pressing the button on the toolbar.  There are two problems with the browsing mode. You can’t use shift to select a range of files, and the select all button selects all photos in the folder and it’s subfolders(Meaning that if you have a folder with 200 photos, and a subfolder within that folder of all the photos you don’t want to share (coughpr0ncough), you either have to move the subfolder, or manually select 200 photos. Once you have created a list, you can order the list any way you want, and you can change the view. You have thumbnail view, which is self-explanatory, then you have two other views. You have Album view and Mantle view.  Both views are pretty accurate at detecting which pictures are o.k. to shrink or crop and which one look best left full-size.

Once you have compiled the list, ordered it, named it, etc, it’s time to share. Clicking on the share button will give you a text box where you need to put the .NET passports of the people you wish to share with. The next time these people log on to Microsoft Max and go to Other people’s lists, they will see an invite to download the list if you are online. If you are logged in to Max and close the main window, it remains in the system tray, so you can share your pictures even if you are done with Max. If they accept the download, the pictures are downloaded to their PC, so you don’t have to be online just so they can view your pictures.

Max is still a beta, and it shows. At the time of writing, Max only supports English. Max is also a memory hog due to it’s largely-unoptimized code. Despite these flaws, Max shows promise. So does Windows Vista’s UI, which will abide by similar UI standards, as well as including WinFX, which Max based on. The future for Max is unclear. Will it remain a photo sharing app only, or will it become Microsoft’s answer to Google’s Picasa? Only time will tell.