www.nickhodge.com

The recently released New York Times Reader (http://www.nytimes.com/mem/reader_regi.html) is what the Adobe PDF Reader should be today. Small, data-driven, dynamic, inter­act­ive and skinable.

Scott Hansel­man states this is a pre­cursor to WPF based RSS read­ers. I am going to go one fur­ther and state this is the future of dynamic pub­lish­ing for large, paper-based pub­lish­ers. A ter­rit­ory tra­di­tion­ally marked by Adobe as their home soil.

Adobe, the old leader in this space with PDF, has missed the ferry to New York and may be stuck on the island for a while. Even Mac­ro­media (now mar­ried to Adobe) has missed this boat.

Small:

Times Reader will requires .Net Frame­work 3.0. Today this is a hassle. In the future, with Vista and wider deploy­ments the base Frame­work, the com­par­at­ive size of the down­loads will become very noticeable.

The installer is less than 1Mb, installing an applic­a­tion that is 2.5Mb.

The Adobe Reader is lar­ger (21.5Mb).

Data-driven:

Rather than the con­tent being bound up with the present­a­tion, some­thing that IT pro­fes­sion­als con­stantly con­sider bad archi­tec­ture, with the Times Reader these are kept separate.

The dis­play res­izes cor­rectly, but within the bounds of the New York Times look-and-feel. Design­ing for this style of lay­out is not simple today: it requires the smarts of a developer to gen­er­ate. I believe there is a mar­ket to wire backend ser­vices to cus­tom publisher-centricinterfaces in a mech­an­ism non-experienced pro­gram­ming design­ers can grok.

Main­tain­ing the own­er­ship of the con­tent, even in a creative-commons man­tra world, is crit­ical. There is a sig­ni­fic­ant invest­ment in infra­struc­ture to run a pub­lisher, and this must be paid for. Adding value is the only way a large pub­lisher can charge for their premium con­tent. Whilst the Adobe Reader has mech­an­isms for, cough, DRM, inbuilt — it is another bar­ren waste­land in daily pub­lish­ing worlds.

Dynamic:

The cent­ral dogma/mantra of the Adobe Reader is to retain the ori­ginal designer’s intent (includ­ing fonts) Acrobat does have lim­ited reflow and res­iz­ing abil­ity; mainly tacked onto the Reader to per­mit access­ib­il­ity. There is an under util­ised fea­ture of Acrobat called the Art­icle Tool. Ever used it? It has been in there since the very early versions.

The Times Reader per­mits res­iz­ing of the applic­a­tion and cor­rectly reflows the text; in a com­pos­i­tion mech­an­ism that Adobe has liv­ing in InDes­ign, InCopy — even Page­Maker. Why can’t these be bolted into an Adobe Reader? InDes­ign could be turned into the fron­tend design tool; Cold­fu­sion is at the backend. Maybe this is too old ground for Adobe?

Inter­act­ive:

Search­ing in the Times Reader is a pleas­ure, and sur­prises you. With dynamic search­ing; that is the rel­ev­ant art­icles appear under the search box as you type is way excel­lent. The Topic Explorer is worth the price of entry, alone. It reminds me of Apple’s MCF/Hotsauce/Project X.

Skin­able:

New York Times owns the inter­face, lock-stock-and-barrel. The exper­i­ence is theirs. Being a news­pa­per of record, this is crit­ical. To change the inter­face to match their cor­por­ate stand­ard is some­thing that the Adobe Reader should permit.

As Scott Hanselman states, the Times Reader is the cur­rent poster child for Microsoft’s WPF tech­no­lo­gies. The only arrow I can aim at its heart is the Win­dows XP/Vista only nature of the Reader. Come on Microsoft, release a MacOS ver­sion! Hav­ing .Net on the Mac plat­form is prob­ably the friend­li­est Unix you guys are going to get since Xenix.

It also hap­pens to trump the old king of type and present­a­tion: Adobe. Will Apollo save Adobe’s repu­ta­tion? Let’s hope its Apollo 11, not Apollo 13.