It's been a very exciting week since we did our big Reader update. It's good to see that people have been liking our work. At the same time, we know there's still lots to do, which is why we've been busy fixing bugs and tweaking things in response to user feedback. Today we did a small release, a .0.1 of sorts. Here are some of the things that changed:
Pick your start page: You can now select which page you'd like to see when you first log in to Reader ("Home", "All items", or any folder or tag). Simply go to settings and on the Preferences tab pick which one you'd like to see.
Hiding the left side: If you'd like to get the list of subscriptions on the left out of the way so you can focus on what you're reading, you can just hit the u key (press it again to go back to the regular view).
Refreshing: We've added a small "Refresh" link at the bottom of the list of subscriptions, so you can easily refresh them to see if there are new items. Better yet, they will automatically refresh every few minutes, so you shouldn't even have to click the link. When an unread count has changed, it will flash yellow for a split-second to help you find it. This yellow fade made our Web 2.0 meter that we have in our office move up a tick.
Space is smart again: The space key now intelligently goes from item to item and from page to page (for longer items), just like it used to in the old interface.
In addition to all this, we've also fixed a few bugs. Your feedback in the discussion group has been very helpful in helping us prioritize, so please keep posting there (even if we don't reply to every single message, we are reading all of your comments).