Times Reader 2.0

On May 12th, New York Times announced the Times Reader 2.0 is now available. This new version is powered by Adobe AIR and can run equally well on Windows, Mac, Linux platform. If you are member of New York Times website, you can free download it. Installing it, it becomes more convenient to read the news from New York Times.

There are many columns such as International, National, Opinion, Business, Sport etc in Times Reader. It will help you find the news which you are interested in. It also offers the latest news so that you can obtain the latest information in time. You can choose the news according to the publishing date. In fact, it provides all news in a week. In the Times Reader, you may change the browsed way. Even you can watch the news in video or pictures. It is the extraordinary experience.

Figure 1: Front Page

Figure 2: News in Pictrures

Figrue 3: Browse Mode

I remember that I had installed the oldest version of Times Reader a couple of years ago. It was developed by WPF which is a technology produced by Microsoft. I have to agree it was amazing experience at that time. It improved the readability and useability for us. If each of publishers of newspaper provided the reader like this, no one doesn’t like to visit the website maybe, I think.

The new version of Times Reader was dropping WPF/Sivlerlight for Adobe AIR. What does it mean? It means Microsoft lost the important customer? It means Adobe AIR is better than WPF/Silverlight? Both are right, maybe. After New York Times announced the new version of Times Reader, InfoQ reported the news which title is “New York Times Dropping WPF/Silverlight for Adobe AIR“. The author wrote: “The biggest hurdle [of WPF]was the lack of cross-platform support.” I agree his opinion. Additionally, the compatibility of WPF/Silverlight is the other issue.

In the field of Rich Client Application, Microsoft lost more and more customers this year. After one year of using Silverlight, MLB swithed back to Flash to show its boradcasted live on the internet on 2009. Now, New York Times choose Adobe instead of Microsoft. What does it happen? Perhaps Microsoft should think about its strategy and improve the quality of service.