Comments on: New York Times launching AIR-based news reader

Application will take advantage of some of the new features built in to the new AIR runtime, including video capabilities of Flash 10 and a fast text-rendering engine.

[sdmorais]

Yawn. While I can see the value of these types of readers on things like the iPhone (I love the NYTimes app on that), using a site specific reader when you already have a perfectly good browser to do the same seems completely redundant to me...

[iertry]

It is good for people who don't use the web much. For example I my mum wanted to read the news on the computer (but didn't understand a web browser) this app is perfect for her. Also people who just want a quick glance at the headlines without firing up a browser and typing in the address and waiting for the page to load. For some people it is very useful.

[MatthewFabb]

With the new text engine in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5, a lot more can be done with the look of text than can currently be done in a browser. The New York Times will be able to reproduce the text to look exactly the way it does, columns and everything as it does in their newspaper.

Plus this application apparently has the ability to cache a complete newspaper while online and then go offline to while reading. I imagine a closer look would show other features not available in a browser.

[dragonbite]

I'm glad they are releasing a Linux version of it. Can't hurt them to tap into the Linux crowd as well as Windows/Mac!

[Brian_Caulfield]

Holy crap. It's like a web browser that can only read The New York Times.

And people wonder why newspapers are in trouble.

[LibertyNews]

Wow it looks like Adobe took Jonas Martinsson's Idea over at the http://www.feedjournal.com and made it fully work.
I've been publishing my own "Digital Feed Newspaper" at http://www.Libertynewsprint.com
I hope they offer reader as an open system so that people can feed in their own News content and not have it controlled by the New York Times.