NY Times Reader for Mac Available. Uses Silverlight? (Update: Not any more!)

The New York Times has released a beta of their Times Reader app for OS X, but they shot themselves in the foot with one poor decision: They chose to develop it using Microsoft’s barely out of the gate Silverlight (MS’ answer to Adobe’s Flash).

It’s really too bad to see big firms make poor decisions like this, though I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.

Here’s hoping someone at The Times sees the light and re-builds the Times Reader for Mac in Flash instead. I’m betting MS paid them a chunk of change to use Silverlight to try and get Mac users to have a “need” for installing Silverlight…and if they didn’t get any payment from Microsoft for doing this, then it’s an even poorer decision.

Update:  May 8, 2009: Times Reader 2.0 sneak peek is announced. It was built with Adobe AIR.

Update: May 12, 2009: The Adobe AIR-based Times Reader 2.0 was released less than one week after the sneak peek was announced.