So Microsoft Max is...interesting. Sure, the app is a memory hog, the WinFX installer failed the first time around, and the interface has been called too simple by some. Then there is the fact that the section claiming to have other people's lists has no such thing (presumably until somebody shares their list with me - any takers?) and the "news from the team" box was empty for a long time before it pulled in the blog entries. But just having a self-updating blog section within an app is somehow inherently cool.

As are the different 3D views, the fact that it runs pretty nicely on my Toshiba M200, with WinFX being retrofitted onto Windows XP SP2 - that last feature seems very cool to me. And just sliding things around, making the pictures zip around and rearrange themselves provides hours of fun. Somehow the "oversized" UI with its sliders and big icons "feels good" on a tablet.

But the most intriguing nugget is the fact that the Max installer itself looked quite like a Windows patch update - and then I found out that Microsoft Update can automatically update it! Is this the first non-mainstream app from Redmond capable of this? Will we see more - perhaps all new apps could be integrated with MU? Then Vista could simply have a control panel that lets you see the latest revisions of your apps, and update them from there. And third-party software - say Adobe Acrobat - could just integrate right into that panel with its own update server. At any rate, I can't wait for some Max updates to come down the pipe!