Today the New York Times Reader for the Mac was announced. It is a Microsoft Silverlight application, what makes it siginificant is that the reader is one of the first mainstream RIA applications developed using Silverlight to target a "NON-WINDOWS" computing platform.

A beta version of Times Reader for Mac users will be released this month.The Times Reader for the Mac provides the core set of features that have made the PC version popular. These include the easy-to-read paginated format, the ability to view the paper offline, a seven-day archive, text search, the ability to adjust the font size and access to Premium Crosswords.

According to Mr Rob Larson (VP of Digital Production for the NY Times):

"We are using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to render the pages on the Mac version. Silverlight includes a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) tools we use on the PC version. This allows us to keep the look and feel of the Mac version very close to the PC version and also allows us to reuse code across platforms. However, text flow and copy/paste are not currently supported through Silverlight yet will be soon."

 If you are interested in the underlying technology for your own publications, Microsoft offers the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit, which the times reader evolved from. It is available at Microsoft's WindowsClient.net for further investigation.