Silverlight Mac OSX Desktop Application

NYTimes has released a Mac OS version of their desktop application Times Reader, so I decided to install it and here’s what I saw …
 
Times Reader Install Silverlight
 
WO ! .. Silverlight for a desktop application? .. I continue installing and get it running and to my surprise it does in fact use Silverlight …
 
Times Reader
 

You can read a detailed description of the Application here on The New York Times blog, this is what they say about the technology used ..

Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application, which uses the Safari toolkit and Silverlight to render the pages.

Now this is not a new approach in the Flash world, but I think this is the first time it has been done with Silverlight.

In the process the guys at NYTimes were able to create a framework that does a lot of what AIR does .. native window, file read write, same code for web app and desktop app etc etc. This is very intriguing because if Microsoft decides to build upon this approach they could come with an equivalent of AIR that can run Silverlight based desktop applications across platforms. Of course, they do not need something like this for Windows since conceptually a Silverlight app could be compiled to run on Windows desktops, but this could be an interesting approach for them to take on other platforms. What do you think?

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Published:
05.24.08 / 3pm
Category:
AIR, RIA, SilverLight, WPF