The New York Times discovers the Mac
When Bill Gates and New York Times (NYT) publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. unveiled the Times Reader in April 2006, they demonstrated the program to the American Society of Newspaper Publishers on a tablet PC — a piece of hardware Gates was very excited about at the time.
Tablets still haven’t quite caught on, but the software — which syncs to the Times’ servers and delivers an easy-to-read, paginated version of the paper that can be browsed offline — developed a loyal following. At least among Windows users; more than two years later, there still isn’t a version that runs on the Apple (AAPL) Macintosh.
But there will be. On Tuesday, Rob Larson, VP for digital production at the Times, showed off sample pages of Times Reader for the Mac and announced that a beta version will be available later this month. See here.
Larson also stuck around to answer questions. The service will be free while it’s in beta. After that it will cost $14. 95 a month (about a quarter the price of a print subscription). If you have a home delivery subscription, you’ll get the Times Reader for free.
It’s a Cocoa application that uses Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Silverlight plugin to render the pages.
I’m delighted to see support for our Macs. It’s great that it is a Cocoa application, which makes available all the excellent features of the Mac OS. It’s extremely unfortunate that the NYT is tryingt o push Silverlight at us, rather than using a standards-compliant tool, of which there are so many. Please, send your developers off to re-write this app to make is work without the use of proprietary technology.
Afraid I must agree. If you must put MicroCrap software into any device, it can’t be a device you’ll use for anything more important than setting cold drinks on to avoid rings on the table.
Too bad, I won’t be using it. I’m not about to add a Silverlight craplet to my mac. Good going NYT…
News of Times Reader for Mac is most welcome to this Mac. Before everyone forgets what newspapers look like, it’s important to let the reader experience online what it is to turn the pages of the paper, see the play the stories get, decide whether you want to read the story based on more than a headline you click or not. i hope that’s what’s ahead.
Too bad Silverlight blows. Even its developer, Microsoft, uses Flash on most of their own sites instead.
The MAC is relevant, the Times isn’t (hasn’t been for years).
I read quite a lot of news on my iPod Touch (on the couch). A mobile version of this for iPhone/iPod would be very welcome., especially since a New York Times subscription is a fortune up here in Canada.
Could I really be first to comment? I feel so special.
If newspapers or magazines ever make their products available via wireless updates that could be streamed directly to a smartphone or iPhone then they might actually have something. For now the screens are still to small and Tablet PCs are too clunky to lug around just for that purpose. MacAir might be a viable solution but it’s still a niche market that won’t catch on enough for Big News to pony up the money to invest in it.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
I have yet to see a compelling reason that Silverlight is bad. Other than, “it sucks.”
I mean, I would like to agree. But I don’t even notice it exists on my machine.