Microsoft Kills "Max"

According to Flexbeta, Microsoft has killed the "Max" skunkworks project. The Max photo organizer program was a project of Hillel Cooperman, one of the Vista UI guys, and was designed to show off the capabilities of the Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Avalon). If you're not familiar with the term "skunkworks", it denotes a project done for purely research purposes. It's not unusual for a skunkworks project to turn into an actual shipping product (a lot of Google's skunkworks project end up in the wild, thanks to their 20% policy), but what's unusual about this one is that Max was looking very good. It's telling that a version for Vista never reached beta, since WPF was a key feature of Vista. The excuses for why this never happened were pretty flimsy ... could it be that Max has actually become part of Windows Vista?

Probably not. Max was very ... VERY pretty, and would have made the rest of the OS look amateurish by comparison. Not that Vista doesn't look good, but Max was incredibly gorgeous, and was pretty much the only realization of the early demos Microsoft showed off of what the then "Longhorn" would be capable of. If all of Vista's micro-apps looked as good as Max, Vista could give the Mac purists something to consider. Anyway, all we know at this point is the cryptic message left behind by the Max team ... to keep checking ideas.live.com.