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Great WPF Applications #10: Daily Mail, Seattle P-I, forbes.com, New York Times

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I've been holding off from highlighting the New York Times Reader as one of the applications in my portfolio for a few weeks, even though it clearly is a polished example of how WPF can transform user experience. Today, we can finally reveal one more little secret, with the announcement of three more amazing news reading applications: from the Daily Mail in the UK (owned by Associated Newspapers), forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here (owned by Hearst Corporation).

From the early days of Avalon (as it was then known), we made a pretty hefty investment in improving the text reading experience. You can see this at every level of the stack:

  • In ClearType, we implemented sub-pixel positioning and y-direction smoothing. Studies done by the University of Texas show that ClearType increases reading speed by 5-7% with no reduction in comprehension.
  • Within the rendering stack, support for OpenType features such as ligatures, contextual alternates, traditional numerals and swashes improve readability and allow for greater freedom of expression by designers.
  • At the document level, the implementation of flow content allows semantics to be applied to text such that it can automatically reflow across multiple columns and pages, with embedded headers and footers, figures, floaters, tables, lists and formatting and support for dynamic resizing of the containing element.

Combining these three capabilities together provide a major set of enhancements over traditional web-based interfaces: instead of a fixed column of text with fixed pagination and limited font support, you have tremendous flexibility, control and customization over the reading experience. As a simple example of this, click here if you have .NET Framework 3.0 on your machine - this is simply a loose XAML file and two PNG images - no code, nothing beyond regular XAML markup. That's what the platform provides out of the box in WPF.

When we started to work with the New York Times, it was clear that we could go still further by creating a client-side Windows application that applied these technologies. And so we collaborated with them to build a full reader application that supplements the above services with ink and text annotations, advertisement support, offline synchronization, integrated search, dynamic retrieval of new articles from custom RSS feeds, and smart templates. We launched the New York Times reader together last fall, and it remains available today free of charge from the New York Times website.

What most people didn't realize was that this wasn't a one-off application; we've been working ever since to turn that same reader code into a more generic toolkit that any web content publisher can use to create their own custom reading experience. The launch today of these new reading experiences demonstrates the flexibility and attractiveness of the toolkit; even a cursory examination of the four readers side-by-side shows how each newspaper has been able to tailor the reader application for their own brand and needs.

The Daily Mail is presented in a tabloid format as a newspaper, with oversized headlines and a different reader demographic to the high-brow New York Times. Compared to the other two newspapers, their stories are typically somewhat shorter and photos play a greater role: as a result, they have a different template. The Seattle P-I newsreader has a distinctive typeface and a template closer in style to the New York Times reader; a couple of innovations they've implemented include an archival capability that allows you to read news from previous editions, as well as a Windows Vista sidebar gadget that shows the latest stories and acts as an entry point into the main application. All four readers share support for offline reading and integrated search.

This is just the start: at the moment the toolkit is in a private beta, but in a few months time we'll be releasing the reader SDK more broadly so that anyone can build a similar customized application. Once you've implemented support for RSS feeds with custom extensions to support the reader functionality, it's a relatively short step to getting an initial application up and running. Expect to see many more similar news readers appearing over the next weeks and months.

Download links:

I shouldn't forget to highlight IdentityMine, who customized the forbes.com and Seattle P-I readers, and Conchango, who worked on the Daily Mail eReader. These are two great WPF partners who did an excellent job on all these applications.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2007
    Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF aka "Avalon") is a massive step forward for Windows client development,

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2007
    I've had the NY Times Reader from the beta and I love it! To me, it's a good example of a "killer (wpf) app".  My admiration for the program goes beyond it's great UI though.  Shortly after running it for the first time I took a look at the disassembled code via Reflector.  It was interesting to see how it was designed and notice a few obfuscated sections of code as well. I'm really glad there will be an SDK.  I have an app idea I'd like to use it for.

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2007
    Wow, this is what I hoped for since the New York Times' NewsReader. The experience with NYT reader is so good that I wonder if there is anyway that it can be used for other website too. Now, with the release of these readers, I'm glad. However, thinking about it, I think it introduces another problem: if you frequently read two or more news sources and each of them has their own reader, then you have to run two (or more) of them at the same time to keep up-to-date. There should be a genetic reader that allow you subscribed to many news source in the same application and you can switch between them. (this is different from the RSS reader because you actually can read the whole content without having to go to the website) Anyway, I'm looking forward to the release of the SDK so that I can give the idea a try.

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2007
    A couple of weeks ago I posted a list of cool WPF applications . This list of applications published

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2007
    【原文地址】 WPF Text Reading and Flow Document Support, and the new NYTimes, Daily Mail, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2007
    The readability of the content is just superb with this app. I wonder if this app can be used for web sites. Users hate scrolling on the web sites and this compact, easy-to-read and navigate features provided with this type of reader should be transferrable to the online world. Can we get something like this for all of MSDN?

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2007
    A bunch of miscellaneous stuff: I don't recall who put me onto this, but I'm enjoying Jessica Hagy's...

  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2007
    Mary Jo Foley takes note that Microsoft has released a update to Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 for

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2007
    Tim, Is there any ETA on the reader SDK? Alex

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2008
    Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2008
    Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2008
    Here are the links to the demos, resources, and the ppt deck from the WPF Data Visualization session

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    Here are the links to the demos, resources, and the ppt deck from the WPF Data Visualization session

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2008
    Here are the links to the demos, resources, and the ppt deck from the WPF Data Visualization session

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2008
    Here are the links to the demos, resources, and the ppt deck from the WPF Data Visualization sessions

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2009
    Here are the links to the demos, resources and the ppt deck from the “WPF Data Visualization”

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2009
    Here are the links to the demos, resources and the pptxdeck from the “Building Rich Business Clients

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2009
    Here are the links to the demos, resources and the pptxdeck from the “Building Rich Business Clients