It seems it’s Microsoft test day for me. I’ve been cleaning up my “Downloads” folder, and realized I’d downloading a bunch of applications that I’d not yet had a real chance to take a look at yet. While I am trying to remember what tasks I have to do, I decided to do some cleaning up. Why? Something I’d read from David Seah suggested that a good way to get things going is to get organized, and having over 5GB of downloaded files is rather cluttering, especially when I barely use them, and some are not so descriptive (setup.exe).
Back on topic… One of the downloads was for Microsoft Max. It’s designed to be a picture viewer/sharer type thingy, with News bundled in. I must say, it’s quite nice in terms of looks. I’ve not had a chance to play with the imaging side of it, but the news is certainly interesting. It has some interesting features to it, and some strikingly obvious missing ones too.
What do I like:
- The newspaper style interface. I like the fact that the interface has a nice clean split, and only displays a few articles at once.
- Scaling. If you resize the window, the fonts, and “paper” resizes with it.
Things I don’t like:
- No sorting.
- Articles aren’t always listed in the most logical order (date sorted, but in the newspaper format isn’t always obvious).
- No clear notification on new articles.
It’s a start, and the developers look like they’re taking notice to what the community is saying, so it should be interesting. I’m going to give it a run about and see how it goes against Feedreader.