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• We've Released the News Reader SDK!

  Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio I've been building up of Great WPF Applications . As I mentioned at the time, the New York Times reader is based on an SDK that we built to allow newspapers and content publishers to create rich, "occasionally-connected" experiences based on the flow layout capabilities in WPF. We've had a private beta program running for a while now, and over the intervening months there have been a number of other newspapers that have gone live with applications using this toolkit. Now we're delighted to announce the public release of the reader toolkit on windowsclient.net . We've made a number of improvements to the kit to broaden its usage; the reader toolkit is now known by the rather more accurate but slightly less memorable name: the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit . This reflects its potential to go beyond a news reading scenario and handle other kinds of data synchronization Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008 1:58 PM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, msdn, Sample, new york times, RIA

• The Art, Science, and Business of Killer Content Experiences MIX Session

  I hope some of you who are attending MIX were able to attend this talk this morning. If not, here's a short summary of the chat along with some screen shots of the Silverlight Times Reader prototype that was demo'ed during the talk. Kevin Gjerstad, Group Program Manager of WPF , walked through some of the history of typography, the problems with reading today on screen, and how WPF aims to address those problems with features like multi-column layout, pagination, dynamic hyphenation, and optimal paragraph. Robert Larson, VP of Product Development at the New York Times , walked through the WPF based Times Reader and the business model that they're employing with it. Also, the most exciting part -- at least for me -- was hearing about their user metrics. The most staggering statistic is that there's a average 7x increase in user page views when compared to the web site! Warrick Fitzgerald, CTO at LiveTechnology , demonstrated WPF adaptive ads produced from their LiveAdMaker system. This system Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 3:15 PM from WPF Text Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: new york times, MIX, Times Reader, silverlight

• Times Reader Goes Subscription

  The New York Times announced that the Times Reader application's Beta period ends soon and it will be be converted to a $14.95 / month subscription service that will include Times Select and Premium Crosswords, which were previously paid content anyway. Also apparently home delivery customers of the paper will now get the Times Reader for free. Rob gives his perspective on the pricing. I suspect the Times is just testing the waters here. Of course they're in the subscription business to stay, but I wouldn't be surprised if they factor in usage data and tweak the model to accommodate the potentially diverse user base. Let me tell you, there's more method than madness behind SKU differentiation . Read More... Posted Saturday, March 17, 2007 10:14 AM from Even a chimp can write code | 1 Comments Filed under: WPF, Windows Vista, Windows Presentation Foundation, new york times, Times Reader

• Great WPF Applications #10: Daily Mail, Seattle P-I, forbes.com, New York Times

  I've been holding off from highlighting the New York Times Reader as one of the applications in my portfolio for a few weeks, even though it clearly is a polished example of how WPF can transform user experience. Today, we can finally reveal one more little secret, with the announcement of three more amazing news reading applications: from the Daily Mail in the UK (owned by Associated Newspapers), forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here (owned by Hearst Corporation). From the early days of Avalon (as it was then known), we made a pretty hefty investment in improving the text reading experience. You can see this at every level of the stack: In ClearType, we implemented sub-pixel positioning and y-direction smoothing. Studies done by the University of Texas show that ClearType increases reading speed by 5-7% with no reduction in comprehension. Within the rendering stack, support for OpenType features such as ligatures, contextual alternates, traditional numerals and swashes improve Read More... Posted Thursday, February 22, 2007 11:18 AM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, portfolio, new york times