What did I do this weekend?  Work, of course.  I finally started on the souped up on-screen newspaper renderer.  GDI doesn't support anti-aliased text, GDI+ was too slow, Flash doesn't have an API I could call, and Quartz is OSX only, so I had to put one together myself.  Key requirement is the ability to fill a large screen full of anti-aliased text and images and switch between two zoom factor fast.

By fast, I mean fast enough to trigger the illusion of viewing a real page instead of a painted screen.  That's the magic sauce that will get people into reading on screen.  You would know this too if you spent a few days doing crazy stuff with newspapers while your wife looked on with a worried look.

The good news is that I got a good enough result with some experiments that I am going to invest more time on the project.  The bad news is that it's not fast enough to do zoom transition animation.  I'll have to add some cheap visual hints to trick the reader's eyes instead.