Times Reader focuses on improving the user experience of reading the NY Times on your laptop, netbook, or home PC.

Times Reader 2.0 (click for full size)

Using Adobe’s AIR framework enables cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) support, and makes possible offline access (the reader downloads and stores up to 7 days of papers). Intriguingly, the 2.0 version in some ways more closely mirrors the print edition of the paper than the online:

The first version of Times Reader was organized more like NYTimes.com than the printed paper. On the Web, where our readers may not visit every section, we play the same story across many sections. For example, a story about the sale of a sports team- might appear in both our Business section and our Sports section. In print, of course it will appear only once. On the Web, where our readers may not visit us every day, we sometimes leave stories that were published yesterday, or the day before, on the section front. In print, of course we only include today’s news. In TimesReader 2.0 you will now see only today’s stories, and only in the sections in which they were published in print.

(For more info on the new features and thinking behind the design see Sneak Peak of Times Reader 2.0).

As in the previous version, Times Reader provides an interactive version of the NY Times crossword (non-subscribers get an archived puzzle). Finally, this version of the reader adds a “News in Video” view to the “News in Pictures” view from the previous version, as well as a “browse” view which shows pages laid out in a matrix, and allows you to scan through the articles.

The experience of using the reader is actually quite pleasant – columns reflow automatically to fit available real estate, pictures are vivid, and the layout is clearly designed for reading on screen. What you lose, though, is the community. Look at this article view, for example:

Article View in Times Reader (click for full size)

What if, while reading this article, I decide I want to share it with my friends, my colleagues, or my broader social network? What if I wanted to write a blog post about it? Not only do I not have any of the social sharing buttons users have come to expect (digg, stumble upon, facebook, twitter, most popularly), I don’t even have a url (let alone a permalink – it is as though the content had no web representation whatsoever – planning for later articles which might be only available via Times Reader?).

Nothing in the interface points me to the same article on NYTimes.com, though a quick google search finds it as a post on the Dealbook blog, complete with email and share tools:

Article Tools on NYTimes.com Blogs

What about integration with Times People, the NY Times own social network style community? If I were a Times Reader subscriber (at the current $14.95 a month it’s a pricey user experience compared to the web), would I be able to share my activity from inside the Times Reader with non-subscribers outside?

Will the Times Reader find an audience with those who miss the experience of reading the paper in print, and have no use for the community tools? One could argue that the NY Times through its APIs, Times People, and related efforts, offers more than enough community interaction for those who need it.

Is this a deliberate and strategic decision to offer different experiences to different audiences, or just a limitation of the 2.0 release?

Which is more important to you – community interaction or a pleasing user experience? Does it make sense to have to choose?

As Mike points out, the fact that the Tamarin is an open source project, and that various people in the community have over time deciphered the SWF file format, does not make Flash anything other than a proprietary product.

In many of the presentations I give about rich Internet applications, I use a slide which looks something like this:

It’s intended to communicate two key concepts:

1. There are a huge number of mature, professional open source toolkits and frameworks for building RIAs.
2. There is strong pressure on proprietary, closed, commercial toolkits and frameworks in this space to open up, at least in terms of source code visibility and modifiability, if not in terms of redistribution.

I suppose one could argue about the relative placement of Silverlight (which coincidentally this morning is throwing classic “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.” errors), since there is will be an open source implementation of it (moonlight). Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) similarly is a very proprietary package although it leverages webkit and Adobe cooperates with / contributes to the webkit community. The Flex SDK is free (as in beer, not as in freedom), though my impression is that teams which expect to do serious Flex development work end up using the proprietary toolset and other closed-source pieces (AMF) in addition to what is in the open SDK.

Does it matter? Do you care if the framework on which you build RIAs is fully open, partially open, or not at all open?

As I argued in my discussion of Mozilla Prism versus AIR, I think it matters quite a bit in certain scenarios, perhaps less in others.

At a minimum, before you invest significant development time (and therefore dollars) in building on a given framework, you ought to have a clear understanding of what parts of it are open and what parts are not.

As the following image (from the Mozilla Labs Prism page) illustrates, the idea is that Prism splits apart the light coming from the cloud into separate apps. (I know, light doesn’t really come from clouds, but you get the point):

In essence, what Prism does is simply to create a single-url loading instance of firefox without all the browser chrome – so that the application gets an icon of its own, has an entry in the Start menu, is accessible via alt-tab application switching, and the like.

Its an interesting direction for WebRunner, and a good step forward for some specific use cases along the desktop application / web application continuum. Take an app which has offline sync via GoogleGears, run it inside Prism, and you’ve got a desktop application which syncs to the cloud but can also be accessed from other non-prism browsers when you are away from your machine.

(For more info on Prism, see Read/Write Web, Geeks are Sexy, Alex Faaborg’s discussion of its UI, feature suggestions on Prism Brainstorming, Mark Finkle’s discussion of changes from the existing WebRunner, and the forums at Mozilla Labs).

In the process of explaining what Mozilla Labs is up to, the (anonymous?) Mozilla Labs blog entry author said:

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

This got the attention of Adobe’s Mike Chambers, who first posted in the comments on the Mozilla announcement, taking issue with the idea that Prism is fundamentally different from AIR. After all, he noted, AIR also runs applications developed on web standards and runs them in a desktop container with some additional desktop-like features:

So, is the main difference between something like Prism and Adobe AIR, that Adobe AIR is being primarily developed by a company (Adobe), and that Prism is being developed by Mozilla?

Later, he expanded on this issue in a blog post: “Mozilla Prism and the Disingenuous Web,” repeating the notion that AIR and Prism seem quite similar in goal and usage, and complaining:

Come on Mozilla, the web development community deserves better than that. Adobe has been an active supporter of the web development community, of open source, of web standards and of Mozilla (donating the ActionScript virtual machine from the Flash Player (Tamarin)). Adobe AIR leverages a number of open source technologies (including Tamarin, SQLite and WebKit) and we actively participate in both of those development communities, and we have been open with our development process for some time.

So what does differentiate Prism from AIR? (See also “AIR, and a Prism” at Technological Musings for another comparison)

Mozilla Prism, for now, is Windows only; Adobe AIR, for now, is Windows and Mac OS only. Both have promised Linux support in the near future.

As several readers pointed out in comments threads on both Mike Chambers post and the one at Mozilla labs, the Mozilla foundation has a better track record at porting applications to Linux than Adobe does. (Flash Player 9 notwithstanding).

(Note that Linux and MacOS X installers are already listed in the Mozilla Labs Wiki – I’m trying one out in Linux now, and it seems to work just fine).

Adobe AIR is based on WebKit (also used in Safari, originally from the Konqueror browser in KDE) for rendering HTML; Mozilla Prism is based on Firefox. AIR can handle flash content, pdf content, or Ajax (HTML/JavaScript) content; Mozilla Prism can as well, though it relies on the same plugins the Firefox browser does to support these other content types.

One significant difference is that Adobe AIR applications are created by developers, who do some “extra work” to create and package their application as an AIR application, whereas Mozilla Prism applications are created by end users, who take an existing web application and tell Prism to run it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, while AIR “leverages a number of open source technologies (including Tamarin, SQLite and WebKit) and [Adobe] actively participate in both of those development communities, and [Adobe] have been open with our development process for some time” (quotes from Mike Chambers’ blog post), Mozilla Prism is itself an Open Source project (Mozilla Public License).

What this means it that if the development community is unhappy with the directions in which Prism is going, they can fork, and take the existing code base in different directions.

Or, working in collaboration with the existing project, they can extend that code base, taking it to other platforms or contexts.

In other words, I’d say the difference isn’t, to answer Mike Chamber’s question, that one is developed by a company (Adobe) while the other is developed by a foundation (Mozilla), but that one consumes and participates in open source (Adobe AIR), while the other is itself fully open source (Mozilla Prism).

That’s not to say Adobe has not been a good open source citizen or contributed appropriately to WebKit, SQLite, and others – I believe they have contributed substantially to a number of projects. It’s just that an implementation which is fully open is preferable, for many folks, to one which is mostly open except for where it isn’t.

I’m surprised that is still so hard to understand.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to record the audio of the whole presentation, but the slides themselves are now available on the Optaros site: “Rich Internet Applications: The What, Why, When, and How” (pdf, 3.37 MB).

It’s under a creative commons license.