TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: The Times Thinks Outside the Browser


The Times Thinks Outside the Browser


Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Tue, 3 Oct 2006 01:20:25 -0400

The Times Thinks Outside the Browser; Finally, a readable online newspaper.
By Jack Shafer

About six months ago, I canceled my New York Times subscription. It
wasn't an act of protest, nor was I canceling because, like so many
moderns, I don't have time to read a newspaper. I stopped my home
delivery because I had discovered in the newspaper's redesigned Web
site a product much superior to the newsprint Times.

Fickle bastard that I am, I've now abandoned the Web version for the
New York Times Reader, a new computer edition that entered general
beta release today and is currently free. The Times Reader succeeds-as
no other software has-in cramming a daily newspaper into a computer
and making it 1) readable and 2) navigable. And if you're lucky enough
to have once had an employer with deep pockets who bought you a $2,000
Tablet PC, the Times Reader is as portable as the paper version.

Times Reader shouldn't be confused with the Times Electronic Edition,
that admirable failure that accurately bills itself as an "exact
digital replica" of the newsprint Times, or any of the other static
PDF-ish treatments newspapers and magazines have experimented with.
Times Reader exploits new software from Microsoft Windows Presentation
Foundation to do its work, and the less I say about WPF-a subset of
Windows Vista, Microsoft's oft-postponed new operating system-the
better. Suffice it to say that WPF and the Times-Microsoft
collaboration has liberated the newspaper from the design constraints
Web browsers place on designers.

http://www.slate.com/id/2149888/

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