The New York Times released the beta of their Times Reader for Mac software. 

TimesReader for Mac

What is it? From the home page, it is an offline news reader for the New York Times. Good idea! The release product costs $14.95. Not too bad and newspapers have to do something to make money since people are leaving them in droves. Print circulation is on a massive downward slide and, well, paper sucks since it has to be made from trees and shipped and read and ink gets on ones’ hands, etc. etc. While I love books, I am all about making newspapers change as this sort of transitory information can certainly be better handled on the web. 

Using Microsoft’s Silverlight, the product is a pretty decent attempt at a newspaper reader application, but there are some lessons to be learned here for software engineers everywhere.

Here are some good lessons, we as software engineers can take home from this effort:

1. Trying to make something “look like” the old paper on a modern screen can be hard. This probably explains why they chose Silverlight as it makes this sort of thing, matching an existing real-world form or paper, easier. They could also have chosen Flash from Adobe, but Silverlight is newer and backed by a major partner, Microsoft.

2. If you choose a product to base your application upon, make sure it won’t make a whole bunch of people angry. The Mac community has a long history of distrusting Microsoft,  some well-founded, some not so much, but whatever the reason, they are not going to be jumping up and down with excitement to install Silverlight. Flash might have been a better choice for that reason.

3. If you are going to make an Internet application, you might want to include support for popular sharing sites like Digg and Delicious. Also, you might really want to think about allowing customers to support, uh, bookmarking. While the application does let someone email the article it allow neither saving it for use with the normal browser nor sending a summary to said user. I understand the thought process here, “it’s a proprietary application”, but it’s the customer you need to think of here.

4. Primum non nocere ( First, Do No Harm ) - If you are going to go with a custom or proprietary technology to make your application work, don’t make the result worse than its source! One big problem I have with the reader is its seeming blurring of the text and photos. Surely, this is some issue with the way Silverlight anti-aliases things, but photos should not look softer than they do in a browser. I checked this is Vista as well and the behavior is consistent across platform so I am going to make the call it is Silverlight.

5. Customers want to do their own customization not yours. NYT gives the customer three sizes to choose from allowing them to control the presentation. Many customers do not understand this reasoning and instead see this as an unnecessary restriction on their “way of doing it”. Remember, it is the customer’s perspective, not yours, that is important.

6. People will see this application as a web browser, so it better behave like one. The reader does not behave like a normal browser. Personally, I would have made this a web application and just leveraged the browser to do the lifting for the app. But, that would forgo the pay site nature of this product and the “old thinking” of having to “look” just like a newspaper. Fine, we can agree to disagree, but customers are being confused because they can not open pictures, like in a browser, or resize to the full screen, um, like in a browser. Well, you get the idea.

7. If you are going to go propeitary, ( e.g. not web application ) at least try to support common features on the platform you are targeting. Mac has incredible support for saving addresses, built-in dictionary and indexed searches ( Spotlight ), graphics and manipulation and more. Not even a sight of this is in TimesReader for Mac. I don’t know that it is a huge deal but not being able to select text in an article is pathetic. Because of this non-feature, I can’t look up a word in Google or on my local Mac. 

All in all, a good effort here, but needs some work and some people who understand Macs and people to work on this thing.

 

 

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