Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 28 May 2008 08:35
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
The New York Times has followed through on its promise to deliver a Mac version of its Times Reader application, but readers are unimpressed. Why? The NYT chose Microsoft's Silverlight for the implementation.
Times Reader presents headlines, stories and pictures in a newspaper-like multicolumn layout, and caches the material so it can be read offline.
Microsoft describes Silverlight as "a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." It can be used in the creation of applications that run on the desktop as well as in web browsers. Silverlight is largely seen as an alternative to Adobe's Flash.
The NYT selected Silverlight because the Windows version of the Reader had been built using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Silverlight includes a subset of that technology. That said, Times Reader for Mac is a native Cocoa application - it just uses Silverlight to do some of the work.
While the Mac version provides better searching than its Windows sibling (with full text searching over seven days rather then one day of headlines, bylines and article summaries), text flow is not supported so the view is restricted to four pre-set window sizes, and copy and paste are not accessible.
"We are committed to bringing the Mac version to feature parity with the PC version," said Rob Larson, vice president of digital production at NYTimes.com.
But any temporary shortcomings weren't the cause of most comments on
Larson's blog post.
What were they complaining about? Please
read on.
