New York Times Reader

The New York Times have been playing around with .NET 3.0 (WinFX) and have launched a tasty little application called the New York Times Reader.  It uses WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) to present the news in a format very similar to the printed page (I’m assuming it’s using a FlowDocument).  It’s very slick and sticks very close to the look of the real paper, right down to the font.  The theory goes it’ll display wonderfully on any device that supports it; currently that’s just XP SP2 (with .NET 3.0) or Vista, but hopefully soon on the Mac, mobile devices and maybe Linux, using WPF/E (WPF “Everywhere”).

Good luck getting it downloaded and installed though!  You need to register on the site and confirm your email, but then mysteriously nothing happens.  If this misfortune becomes yours, try hitting this link after confirming your email…  No doubt they’ll get these techie issues resolved soon.

Follow the mouse

After messing with a Windows Presentation Foundation demo for the KevinButton, I felt compelled to write something even cooler.  I had the kids sit still long enough for some photos and dropped them into the KevinButton folder (the photos not the kids).  The results were awesome!  I wanted to share the joy, but no-one else in my target audience is uber-geeky enough to have NetFX3 or Vista installed yet.

It was a challenge no Flash developer could resist.  I’m no Flash developer, so here’s the result! (there’s also a very useful SLEEP button and click action).