Daily Archives: May 21, 2008

adobe, flash, internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Who needs AIR? NY Times does desktop Silverlight app for Mac

The New York Times is porting its excellent Times Reader application to the Mac using Silverlight 1.0:

Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application, which uses the Safari toolkit and Silverlight to render the pages.

Follow the link for some screengrabs. Adobe’s AIR (which also uses the Safari toolkit) is the obvious choice for this kind of online app; it’s interesting to see the NY Times adapting Silverlight in a similar manner.

I spoke to developer Nick Thuesen about this at Mix07, so this is not news for readers of this blog; though I’d become sceptical about whether it would be delivered because of the delay. Now, I’m surprised that the NY Times is still using Silverlight 1.0 rather than waiting for 2.0.

The Silverlight version appears to have some compromises. In particular, it cannot flow text on the client:

We paginate the pages for the Mac version on our servers (the Windows version does this on the PC). When you sync, we send you pages for the four window and three font sizes described above.

Still, the screens look good and I look forward to trying it – especially as the public beta will be free, whereas you need a subscription for the full release.

There is a high level of hostility towards Silverlight in the comments to the post. Mostly these appear to be religious in nature – ie. Mac users hate all things Microsoft. It does illustrate the difficulty the company has in persuading the world to take its cross-platform ambitions seriously.

Thanks to Ryan Stewart for the link.

google, internet, microsoft, search, yahoo

Microsoft: forget the Live Search Cashback, just improve the engine

Microsoft is paying users to use its search engine with a new search cashback scheme. Looks like an affiliate scheme where the commission is paid back to the customer. US only.

I think Microsoft should focus on improving its search engine. This morning, I needed to call a local electrician and figured that search would be quicker than using a phone book. I entered the name of the retailer and the town. For some reason, this stymied Live Search: the result I was looking for was not on the first 10 pages. Identical search on Google: the first four results matched, and the address and telephone number were at the top of the page with a little map.

In a poll last year 51% thought Google delivered the best results for an example search, while 35% preferred Live Search and 31% Yahoo. That’s an inconclusive result, and this is not an exact science; but personally I find Google almost always delivers better results, sometimes (as in the case this morning) dramatically so.

If Microsoft managed to reverse this I would switch to Live Search in a heartbeat.

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