Surfin teh Interweb

RIA is short for Rich Internet Application which are supposed to be the Next Big Thing™. And I downloaded my first one yesterday. It's the New York Times Reader. Here's some information about it:

• It downloads the latest edition of the New York Times for offline reading.
• The biggest difference from the New York Times website is the high quality of the fonts and excellent overall reading experience. It feels like reading a real paper.
• There's a fantastic full-screen mode.
• It uses Windows Presentation Foundation, which is a part of the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework. If you haven't already installed it, it's a 50MB download. Luckily you only have to do it once. If you're running Windows Vista you already have it.
  
• It's in beta and free service expires on March 27th after which you pay $15 per month.
• There are annoying animated ads. This is my only real criticism of the whole thing. I don't mind static ads, but the animated ones are really annoying.

Though it's sad that the free version reader will expire on the 27th, I was quickly able to find similar readers from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Forbes and The Daily Mail UK, all of which are completely free (minus some soul-sucking registration.)

I expect the RIA market to quickly heat up, now that WPF is beginning to take a hold and Adobe has just released the first Apollo runtime.

Speaking of Adobe, I was poking around on their website and noticed that you can download a standalone version of Flash Player which includes debugging capabilities. Very useful for analyzing or just playing those downloaded SWFs without having to start a browser.

Labels: flash, freeware, RIA, WPF

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