The "user experience technology" beta allows users to organize and share photos as slide shows.Microsoft last week released the beta of a new photo-sharing sample application that takes advantage of core components of the upcoming Windows Vista platform to deliver a unique user experience.
Hillel Cooperman, product unit manager of the technology code-named Max, demonstrated the application during the opening keynotes of Microsoft's PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles last week
The demonstration followed presentations by Microsoft Corp. chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates and by Jim Allchin, group vice president of platforms at Microsoft. Cooperman later gave a private demo of the software for eWEEK.
Max, also known as Project M, which was the internal name for team working on the technology, is a user experience technology that enables users to make lists of their photos and turn them into slide shows to share with family and friends.
Max is based on WinFX technology: WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly known as Avalon), WCF (Windows Communication Foundation, formerly known as Indigo), the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and other Microsoft technology.
"Max allows you to create visualizations and share them over the Net," Cooperman said.
Max supports the same programming model for both 2-D and 3-D displays. Indeed, Cooperman showed how the Max user interface supported a display featuring "2-D on top of 3-D on top of 2-D," in which a photo sat atop a glossy surface and its reflection was captured in the same image.
Cooperman called Max an experiment, and said, "It's important to have the ability to experiment … We could have done a million different things, but to make a photo-sharing application would be relatively unique."
Max has roots in technology that came out of MSR (Microsoft Research), which Gates demonstrated at last year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, sources said.
At CES 2004 early last year, Gates demonstrated two MSR technologies. One, code-named Media Variations, provided a way for people to explore large amounts of connected information. For example, users could locate movies based on the connections between them, such as common actors, directors or genres, and browse through them using a rich, three-dimensional interface, Microsoft said.
Read the full story on eweek.com: Microsoft Max Shares the Visual Power of Avalon
Graphics Tools 
