The New York Times Web site is still free, at least for now, but they’re touting a new service in which subscribers would pay $0.65 per day for a downloadable copy that’s managed by a new software reader package called NewsStand. And NewsStand doesn’t work on Macs, only Windows.
Another hitch is that NewsStand erases each issue after 21 days, so you can only read or search the previous three weeks of issues. You can also get some interesting results if you’re running Mac OS X. If you are, go to the NewsStand Web site and click on system requirements (at the bottom of the page). A window will pop up and give you the Windows requirements, as well as the message that, “Your system runs UNIX.”
If you’d like to convince the Times to make a Mac version of NewsStand go to their customer support Web site.
A note there reads: “NewsStand is considering developing a Mac version of the NewsStand Reader. Meanwhile, the current Windows version has been tested on OS 9 and OS X using an emulator called Virtual PC, by Connectix.” (Thanks to MacCentral reader Wheat Williams for the heads-up on this item.)