Official Google Reader Blog - News, Tips and Tricks from the Reader team

A new Reader release

10/27/2005 06:02:00 PM
Posted by Jason Shellen, Product Manager

Earlier this week we pushed out a new release of Reader. Most of the changes are under the hood and should make for a faster, smoother experience. However, there were a few user interface tweaks too. My favorite is support for the space keyboard shortcut. In all browsers, pressing the space key moves down in the current page. Reader's addition to that is to advance to the next item if you're at the end of the current one. This means that you can read your entire reading list with just one finger press! I'm sure there is some sort of Pavlov's dog joke to be made here, but we can't take too much credit for the one-click advance, since it's been present in email clients for ages.

Here's a more complete list of other changes we've made:

  • Progress messages for most operations.
  • Usability tweaks when subscribing to feeds.
  • Stopped using "click here" for link text (thanks for reminding us Philipp).
  • Fixed OPML import issues for Newsgator users.
  • Fixed issues with item links in some Planet and Odeo feeds.
  • Fixed Firefox issue that made it eat up the entire CPU when loading items.

We plan on keeping the features and improvements going strong. Feedback = better Reader. Thanks for your help.