Careful where you step! We're moving the furniture in Google Reader.

6/27/2006 09:03:00 AM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

We just made some improvements to managing your stuff in Google Reader to better enable doing lots of things at once. If Reader were a house, I guess we just knocked down a wall -- so you can finally get to the bathroom from the bedroom. (And we added a new patio while we were at it.)

A new settings page

There's now a link in the top right that says "Settings". Clicking on that link opens up a new screen that lists all of your subscriptions and labels, and allows you to make edits to more than one item at a time. We've also added a bunch of new filtering and selection controls. And there's a new feature as well: you can rename any of your subscriptions.

Menus

We've replaced the drawer on the front page with menus for subscriptions and labels. They're faster to load, especially if you have a lot of subscriptions. What's best, the menus allow you to select things without having to shove most of the application out of view.

You are probably already thinking of a number of cool things these changes could allow. You can probably imagine being able to sort subscriptions, or see what things have new stuff in them. Yep. We can too, and we'll be working on that stuff actively.

With a little help from our users

6/07/2006 07:23:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

The Reader team is pretty small and while the list of things we'd like to do is a mile long, there are only so many hours in a day. It's always very satisfying to see that we have users passionate enough to step in and do some of the things that we always thought would be nice to have. Here's some recent examples of this:

Jason Toal has put together an excellent screencast that covers nearly all of the features that Google Reader has to offer. If you know someone who is new to the application, point them to it and they will quickly get up to speed. Even if you are a seasoned user yourself, you may be interested in the more advanced features that are covered, such as sharing.

Speaking of our sharing feature, people have figured out very seamless ways of integrating clips into their sites.

Eli Dourado has written GROSX, a notifier for Mac OS X that tells you when you have new items to read in your Reader account. In addition to a menu bar icon, GROSX also integrates with Growl, allowing you to get notifications of new items with cool translucent overlays. GROSX also lets you monitor a specific label so that, if you have 390 subscriptions like me, you can monitor only the really important things.