Rick Segal, Don Dodge, Robert Scoble, and the top of TechMeme are focusing on Max tonight.
The talk is quite positive. Most are commenting on Max’s nice appearance–in part courtesy of Microsoft’s new Windows Presentation Framework (WPF).
I haven’t had a chance to try the latest version of Max, however, the previous versions of Max that I’ve used have all been stunning. They reflect a design philosophy that’s more “Flash” than “Office” (or Java or Delphi), if you know what I mean. The app looks like something more like you’d expect to see from Apple than Microsoft.
As I’ve been blogging recently, I’ve been developing more and more with WPF. As a developer, I realize I’m taking a bit of a gamble. The technology is still evolving. And it is Microsoft-centric. On the plus side, however, I like WPF’s model better than that in WinForms (and similar implementations in Java and Delphi). WPF has much more flexibility…that works well. That’s the important part to me. WPF handles flickering and scaling with ease, for instance. In contrast, both can lead to hours (or months) of tool building in most other environments.
So I agree with Rick Segal that there’s something exciting going on here–particularly for the .Net Framework.