I actually read about Microsoft Max a couple of days back over at Aaron's UI Design Blog and since then it's had a little more coverage.

I have this morning off work so I tested it out. Pretty much awesome. There are some tiny UI bugs that I've noticed but no show stoppers and certainly not a problem for beta software.

It looks amazing and RSS feeds look great in it! It displays your feeds in newspaper style which works really well. I've taken a screenshot of Claire's feed (hope you don't mind!). Claire has lots of images so thought it would be a great example.

I think it's a great direction for Microsoft to be going in. They need to stop being so corporate so that they can appeal more to you and I.

The only downsides I see with Max is that making photo lists has already been done by Flickr and they do it really well. I haven't yet tested out how they are shared and what not though. If this is bundled with Vista it would help them out a lot I say. One thing is for sure - if I'm showing anybody my photos when they are round I'll be using this to show them. It just looks fantastic and it's fast and does the job well.

On a slightly more technical note, Max uses .NET Framework 3.0 (which us geeks like to call 2.5 because it's really just an extended version 2.0) and the .NET Framework is a great framework to develop with. If you ever feel like it I would say give some C# a go with Visual C# Express or Visual Web Developer Express they are both really great IDEs to develop with and you can do some awesome stuff (shown by Max).