Sunday, September 18, 2005

Max Enhancements Needed

So I had a little time to play on a recently reimaged partition so I decided to install Max to play with. Very cool stuff. Sort of PhotoStory-esque. For someone with little kids and tons of pictures, it's a great tool. However, I see two immediate issues that need to be rectified.

• No Save or Export Capability. I've got Max running on a clean image, but I know I'll want to reimage it again soon when there's a later drop of WinFX or VS or LINQ that I want to play with. However, Max doesn't have any way to save a picture list to the hard drive. Everything (and I mean everything) is stored in an XML file in the C:\Documents and Settings\<userName>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft Codename Max directory. Spelunking the code with Reflector, I see a locally defined namespace called System.Storage. I'm guessing this is a stub WinFS library with the intention of migrating to the real deal at some point in the future. But since it's just a stub, there's no simple way to get stuff in and out of that file. I tried cutting and pasting of the XML, but Max told me the store was corrupted and I had to rebuild my photo list. Please add some way to save photo lists outside of Max!
• No Downlevel experience. I showed my wife the photo list I built and her first response was "can you send me that?" Sadly, no I can't. I realize that Max is supposed to be an example of the new-fangled WinFX stuff, but my wife, her best friend, my mother, my mother-in-law, etc. are NOT going to install the Sept. CTP of WinFX in order to run Max. Most of the cool Avalon stuff is in the authoring experience. Couldn't you export a photo list to DHTML or something?