Windows Client Scenarios - Part 3

In my last post in this series, I how discussed multi-touch apps could enhance the user experience for ISV apps.  Another great scenario for the Windows Client is the offline content viewer.

When the Windows Presentation Foundation was released, one of the great apps available for it was the New York Times Reader.  It enabled the downloading + viewing of articles, making great use WPF's flow document functionality (which makes text much more readable and knowledgable of how to behave properly in the presence of inline media.)

This the app itself isn't available for non-subscribers, the source code for its foundation was packaged for re-use and posted as the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit.  This starter kit readily consumes information formatted as NITF (an XML standard for news articles) and embedded within RSS feeds, and thus, can be used for just about any kind of content.

With a little additional effort, you can build viewer for non NITF content, or pull in information from feeds other than RSS.  You can also extend + restyle the app to suit your needs.  That opens your app to a world of possibilities, and adds tremendous value to the client experience for your customers.

Several other instances of apps built on this are available in production (like the readers for the Daily Mail and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example), but these apps don't have to be limited to news sources (the starter kit app points to MSDN, for example.)

If you let your imagination run, you could envision ways in which some social networking could be engaged here as well.