Cool Website Tuesdays: New York Times

In times of breaking news and shocking events, it’s best to have a go-to website for news and content, and there’s no substitute for the old grey lady, the New York Times. While they might not be groundbreaking in their site design, this is one of the easiest sites on the web to navigate, the content has gotten better in recent years, and there’s just something about reading a newspaper of record.

And…

(I know, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still nifty…)

If you want to see something really cool, try the SilverLight version of the paper. It’s slick because it downloads the paper local, so you can read it offline. If looks like the real version of the New York Times, complete with the type, and if you resize the window, it resizes the article and the number of columns.

It automatically syncs when online like RSS Feeds, and the advertisements are overly obtrusive. It’s not free (and I’m a firm believer that all content shouldn’t be free) but at $15 a month, is cheaper than getting the paper delivered.

Would you pay $15 a month for this service?

CMS Fridays: SharePoint and SilverLight

Go to Part I and Part II for a couple of great tutorials on how to make SharePoint work with SilverLight. It has screenshots and everything!

SharePoint + SliverLight: A Start Guide

I wasn’t paying attention (big surprise), but this came across my RSS feed: SharePoint + SilverLight. Looks like a good read. The original post is over at the SharePoint Product Blog.

Silverlight 2 Essential Getting Started Facts and Guide

Where do you get started if you want to learn SilverLight, but don’t know where to start? The Moth, a Microsoft Developer, has a good blog post that goes past “Hello World”. Give it a read.

Updated Roadmap For SilverLight 2: Release In The Fall

Sure, it’s a moving target, but all software releases are realistically moving targets (personally, I would rather have a stable environment and text-alignment that works than a rushed product out the door). Ashish Thapliyal has published a roadmap of the next releases of SilverLight, plus why some of the items (like GIF support) are missing and will be for a while.

Be forewarned — the differences between Beta 1 and Beta 2 will be drastic, according to him.

Expression Program Manager: To The Applicant, Understand The Market

I work with a lot of rich media developers at my current position, and we’ve been trying to make the journey to SilverLight, a new technology by Microsoft (and a competitor of Flash). It does some really cool things (the whole non-compiled thing will be a plus once they work out some of the details.

I’m not saying it’s a me-too technology — there are some very obvious advantages to it, beginning with standardizing on a programming language people actually use instead of something specialized like ActionScript, but we’ve had the hardest time adjusting to the workflow, and a lot of designers are afraid of this much like they are afraid of Flash CS3 Professional because it is such an adjustment. It was hard enough just moving over to the whole motion graphics world, and now many designers and developers are expected to relearn the application to a certain extent.

To the person who applies for this job, please remember how your job is better adoption in following ways:

• It’s not enough just to have timelines — the application really should be easy to use for designers because they are not programmers
• Make some of the interactions easier to explain like, “how do you make a button so it has the multiple states”, maybe even adding wizards like, “create a new button”
• Produce a product that can actually align text better (text alignment should be one of those 1.0 items, not on the 3.0 product list)
• Cater to the designers that ditched Flash when it moved to Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3
• Most of all, it’s about user adoption and talking to your audience — if you don’t do that, no one will use it