If you are a Mac user looking to get your New York Times fix through Times Reader you now can Times Reader Beta is finally available for the Mac previously, it was only available to Windows users.

Logging onto the New York Times this morning I noticed two things about Times Reader Beta.

1. You must have Microsoft Silverlight installed in order to use Times Reader Beta. Bad news for those trying to avoid Microsoft related products. I use Camino, formerly known as Chimera, and had no problems viewing Times Reader. Camino is Mac OS X only web browser.
2. Silverlight does not support Safari. You’ll have to use another browser if you want to use Times Reader.

I’ve noticed that programs that don’t run native on the Mac OS tend to suffer performance wise. David Pogue talks briefly in his book Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manua. Excellent book by the way. It would be nice to see this application ported to Cocoa.

I downloaded Times Reader this morning on my 17″ MacBook Pro. The application is 1.5MB. The pages loaded very quickly. I found the pages to load very quickly however they don’t scroll. I like that option. You will find that text is laid out in columns. You have two ways to advance you can use the buttons on the screen, or you can use your arrow keys. If you are looking for a specific topic, you can do so by clicking on the search link which is located in the upper left hand corner.

Times Reader for the Mac is free while it is in beta. Once it moves to subscription you will have to pay a fee which is $15. In order to use the reader you will need to register at the New York Times website.

If you don’t want to pay the subscription fee you still get the information for free by logging onto their website viewing it from your RSS feed. However, I can see the reason some will opt for the subscription fee navigation is a lot faster.

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Entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 7:15 am under Announcements, Leopard, MacBook.  Print This Post

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