Yesterday Microsoft released a program it called, “Microsoft Max“. The new application allows users to manage, arrange, and share digital images.
Personally, I’m glad to see this come out from Microsoft. Maybe it will encourage Google to further enhance their Picasa software. Healthy competition in the marketplace can always be a good thing. 
This has been a long time coming. To long to be honest, but it’s done now. That’s right, Microsoft Windows XP Professional has been reinstalled on my main rig. I’m actually in the process of reinstalling various applications as I type this.
So, what are some of the first things I install? Well, in no particular order:
In addition to all of those, I also make it top priority to uninstall many of the default things Windows XP installs. Things like Windows Messenger, MSN Explorer, as well as the default set of games, wallpapers, and various other useless things. After those are gone, I also take a extremely close look at the Windows Services to see what I want to disable. For those of you who don’t know what you can or should disable for better performance, I’d suggest taking a look at this guide.
Google‘s free image management software, Picasa, has seen it’s first major update in sometime.
Included in Picasa 2.0 are several new features that will probably remind you of other Google products (GMail and Google Groups) such as labels and star rating. Picasa also offers more editing abilities.
With Picasa, GMail, Hello, and Blogger (what I use), Google has made sharing (and finding) your images even easier.
Now, if Google would just get around to updating Blogger and the main search a tad bit more, I’d be happy. 
Picasa 2.0 is getting some love at OCC. The discussion can be found here.