RSSMicrosoft Shows Off Vista Reader Apps
By Ed Oswald | Published February 22, 2007, 4:41 PM
After much hoopla over Windows Presentation Foundation and its promise to create rich graphical user interfaces for Vista, not many of the demonstrated technologies have become reality.
Thus, the company set out this week with three media partners including Associated Newspapers, Hearst, and Forbes to leverage the power of WPF through a new digital reader application.
The actual application itself was developed by Microsoft, and each of the companies have customized it to fit their individual publications. The look is designed to approximate that of a newspaper, yet allowing for the interactivity that the Web provides.
The New York Times was one of the first to use this template, offering its reader to Vista beta testers last September. Microsoft will also make it available to other publishers through a free starter kit.
"We believe we're seeing the publishing industry changing," Windows Client Partner Marketing director Dave Wascha said. "Publishers today want to take advantage of increasing digital consumer demand, which is reflected by patterns of online readership and, in some cases, the loss of print readership."
These three companies are part of a second wave of beta testing to ensure that the application is ready to be released publicly for other publishers to use in their own applications.
"The goal is to make it easy for publications and their independent software vendors (ISVs) to duplicate our efforts without Microsoft having to be directly involved," Wascha continued.
Like a newspaper, the application also supports methods for publishers to include print-like advertising. However, unlike the paper, ads would become interactive, allowing the user to call an advertiser by clicking on a phone number, for example.
The applications are built to run on Windows Vista, although Windows XP SP2 users with the .NET Framework 3.0 installed would also be able to run the appliucations.
Wascha says he has seen a lot of interest from publishers, and he expects several new applications coming over the next few months.
"Longer term, we expect to work with all kinds of magazines, and we see this technology being applicable to textbook publishers as well, since one product can support both static print content and supplemental interactive content," he added.
I downloaded and installed the Seattle Post Intelligencer reader application and the associated Sidebar Gadget and I've got to say I'm totally impressed. Probably the best news reading experience I've ever had. I'm sold and will finally be cancelling my front door delivery of my local newspaper.
It's readable, easy to navigate, photos are of higher quality...what's not to like? I can still buy a daily paper on the occasion I want to sit at a coffee shop without a computer but as far I can see this is huge move forward in electronic news.
I will add that I have tried other such applications in the past like the Zinio Reader and Adobe PDF based readers....this is light years better...no comparison at all.
Oh...and can I tell how glad I am that there's no stupid podcast crap on this paper. I'm so sick of being asked to listen to someone read words aloud at 75 or so WPM that I can't believe they have become so popular.
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What a waste of time and money.
Personally I do not wat to download yet another application just to read the newspaper.
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maybe you dont value your newspaper that much.... when it comes to reading lot of small things matter... for me biggest smallest features are contrast, dpi and light mobility so i can read it in places where I can relax.
With vista bigger dpi are easily possible (not just HW thing also software has to have API which supports it).
"not many of the demonstrated technologies have become reality."
Well Iam very happy with all new features in WPF in vista ... i didnt see just one u can see it in chess and lot of build in applications.. i saw lot of other apps as rss feed reader XABL pages... so i dont agree with this line in article topic. We will see inscreasing number of such apps as to use new GUI api takes lot of skills and if there are no skills then try&fail cycles;) IMHO to make good app GUI is more difficult than rest of the app programming.
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I think the real issue here is whether or not people actually want to read The New York Times. I would wager that not many people do, given their continually declining circulation figures.
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People don't want to pay for the print version. Besides, you are missing the big picture here. This newspaper reader is just a simple sample of the technology.
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"People don't want to pay for the print version."
It's not as if their web site is posting record profits.
And, no, I'm not missing the point. Notice how I didn't comment on the program itself, just the content it delivers.
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