We just announced Microsoft Max at the Professional Developers Conference.
Microsoft Max (no jokes about a relationship to Bob, please) is essentially a sample application that turned photos into 3D slideshows that are very attractive. The key is that it takes advantage of Windows Presentation Services, formerly known at "Avalon", which is an inherent component of Windows Vista. The main idea of the tool is to highlight what is possible with Windows Vista & Windows Presentation Services… not to build a new tool.
WHAT IS WINDOWS PRESENTATION SERVICES?
What Windows Presentation Services does is provide a highly optimized, close-to-the-OS set of interfaces for presenting both vector & raster based graphics on the screen with very little effort. A developer can write a small amount of code and create impressively beautiful, vector-scalable, & fast graphics into their applications without having to distribute graphics libaries with their application.
To put this into perspective:
- ACROBAT: Think of having all the vector presentation power of a Adobe Acrobat built in at a low level into Windows. Now imagine that Acrobat’s rendering capabilities are in every application and having all these applications natively interactable – just like a normal Windows application. For example: A version of Microsoft Word with the same fidelity and presentation viewing capability as Acrobat (without the load times of Acrobat of course) and all the ‘security protectiveness’ of documents. (since it’s based on WPS libraries already loaded into memory) This is sort of related to a project we have called "Metro" that some people have been touting as an Acrobat killer.
- SHOCKWARE/FLASH: Now think about having Macromedia Shockware/Flash animation and scale built into the OS, such that these creations run at top speed due to their closeness with the OS, by using WPS. There’s a tool code named Sparkle that provides people with the ability to create these interactive animations for example, and it’s all using Visual Studio-based tools. In other words, any MSDN developer can now do the equivalent work of a Flash programmer on Windows without knowing Flash. Now you know why Adobe acquired Macromedia.
- MAC ‘TIGER’: Think of MacOS "Tiger’s" beautiful interface… now imagine having all of that standard and scalable to the capabilitiees of the hardware on your current PCs AND having the APIs completely exposed to any MSDN developer so they can change the UI or intergrate their own ‘plugins’ (aka Microsoft Gadgets) into the interface or the Windows Vista "Sidebar".
WHY IS MICROSOFT MAX SO FREAKIN’ BIG?
"Isn’t the developer supposed to be able to create ‘very little code’? Why is the Max download so massive?" Good question. It’s because:
1) This is Beta code which is rife with debug statements and
2) This is a download of Windows Presentation Services for Windows XP.
The unique part of Windows Presentation Services however is that it’s been backported to Windows XP to enable developers to write programs that are usable by both Windows XP users today, and Windows Vista users in the future. It’s just that Windows Vista users will find that the install will go MUCH FASTER being that the Windows Presentation Services will already be in the OS and not need to be installed.
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