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Demonstrated at last years Adobe Max Conference the New York Times reader application captured my attention for a couple of reasons. Firstly when shown at Max the displayed the AIR application running on both the desktop and a Linux based mobile device. Secondly it was being developed in conjunction with the Adobe XD team and was a testbed application for the new Text Layout engine in the Flash player.

Anyway enough of the tech for a moment let’s look at the features. Obviously powered by Adobe AIR means that you can take your daily new content with you and view it without a permanent Internet connection. You also have the ability to load up to a weeks worth of back content by simply selecting the day in the drop down menu.

Some of the daily content from the paper is available for free, while you can access more pages including International for a small subscription. This is clearly indicated by the padlock on the main menu. You are shown the first page then any subsequent pages require a subscription.

Oh and you even get the famous NY Times crossword to complete.

Video Review

Design eye

The clean design on show here has not happened by accident. I’m very impressed with the amount of experience design that has gone into producing this AIR application. They wanted to take the feeling and interaction of a real paper and convert it into the digital world. This is not simply a web page containing the same information.

The browse view is especially captivating. The pages are thrown back and you get a birds eye view of the article pages within the New Your Times. Navigation can be completed with the keyboard to flick forwards and back, upwards and down just like you would browse a paper for real to find an article that catches your eye.

This interaction model they have employed here is very similar to that of a microfiche reader. If you can remember these they were very popular in libraries for viewing archived data.

Keyboard usage has been well thought out like pressing space will scroll the page down and the effect timing is just about right. The reflowing of text between columns and across different resolutions adds to a great experience.

For those who are interested there is a great behind the scenes video with the Adobe XD team (how I would love to work there!), check it out here.

Technical eye

The Text Layout Framework in the new Flash player 10 enables this AIR application to render text in incredible detail. This has come on a long way since we had to use pixel fonts in Flash movies to stop them blurring. The fonts used are the same fonts as used by the NY Times and offer great readability ideal for this type of application.

The layout framework also enables the New Your Times Reader application to adjust to differing sizes by reflowing text over variable columns, reducing images even removing them if necessary. Try it for yourself load up the app then at the front page grab the gripper and resize the application, see what I mean cool hey.

Summary

This is what I call a proper RIDA (Rich Internet Desktop Application). Some are saying that the performance is not as snappy as they would like. Personally I found the performance to be more than acceptable and CPU usage was averaging 2.2 at rest on my Mac.

If you have not taken this for a test drive then do it today. This is a great application for demonstrating what a great user experience an AIR application can achieve.