May we get you some chips and a soda too?

11/09/2005 06:18:00 PM

Posted by Jason Shellen, Product Manager

It turns out some folks, like Reader-fan Moebius, are enjoying Reader in new ways:

I don't like to use my laptop on my lap, because of heat and other reasons, and I don't like to be pushing the 'J' key very often, so I downloaded "JoyToKey" to use my gamepad for browsing Google Reader. With JoyToKey I mapped "J" to down and "K" to up, "V" to right, and "Ctrl-W" to left. The other joystick was mapped to other normal browser commands. So, I can read Google News very comfortably sitted on my sofa.

Watch out for gamepad thumb and that other RSS.

Warning: Geekery ahead!

11/03/2005 12:39:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

You may have noticed that some Greasemonkey scripts broke with the recent release (for example, the excellent Google Reader Auto-Read). First, a bit of background. Reader uses JavaScript. A lot of it. So much that it would take a while to download even on a broadband connection. What we (and other Google products) do is to compress it before sending it to the user. So this line of code:

FR_Queue_currentQueue.pageDown();

becomes:

t.ma()

Only people care about descriptive names like pageDown; to a computer, ma is just as good. It turns out that these compressed names will change from release to release, as we tweak the code (the more often a name is used, the shorter the compressed name that's chosen for it). Greasemonkey scripts that rely on these compressed names (like the aforementioned one) will therefore break.

So far the situation sounds pretty dire. How can more stable scripts be written? The answer turns out be quite simple. Reader has UI controls for most things that you'd want to do from a script. For example, if you want to automatically move the queue down, you can think of that as being equivalent to the user clicking the "Down" button repeatedly. Those buttons have IDs that we promise won't change without a good reason. Through JavaScript, you can simulate user clicks. Therefore, if your Greasemonkey scripts relies on them, you'll be all set. To give an example, I've written a modified version of the auto-read script that uses this method. It has code like the following (the simulateClick function is included in the script):

simulateClick(getNode("queue-down"));

I hope this helps other Greasemonkey scripts authors that are trying to tweak Reader (and other sites too).

P.S. We just pushed a new Reader release. No new features, but we have fixed a few bugs with unsubscribing and keeping things unread.

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.

Greasemonkey Scripts

10/21/2005 07:51:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

I've written my share of Greasemonkey scripts. I'm therefore very glad that in turn other people are writing their own scripts for Google Reader. We make no guarantees that we won't (inadvertedly) break them, but we'll certainly be looking at them for inspiration as to what our users want out of the application.

Get Google Reader scripts and more at the Userscripts.org repository. To learn more about Greasemonkey and learn how to install scripts, check out the excellent Dive Into Greasemonkey.

Google Reader: Two weeks

10/21/2005 04:51:00 AM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

First post! Everyone from the Google Reader team would like to say hello. (Say hello, everyone.)

(Everyone looks up while still typing.) "Hello, internet."

I'm lucky I got their attention - the last two weeks have been a whirlwind. Most products at Google see incredible attention whenever they're released and Reader followed this now familiar pattern:

1. Speculation
2. Deluge
3. Feature requests

Given that some servers survived their newfound celebrity and that all of the team members are still breathing (just checked again) I'm willing to call this a remarkable success. Especially for a Labs launch of this scope and for an actual beta-level project. I'd like a recap now - which is as much for my benefit as yours since we've been heads-down for a bit.

Bellweather, labs

A small Labs effort can be used to gauge the amount of interest in Google helping in some area. Since Reader accounts number in the hundreds of thousands in only our first two weeks of being out there it seems fair to say that there is some. Demonstrated need drives development - so we think we can go ahead with many of our plans which have included more interfaces (the lens is just one of several planned approaches), better ways of recommending new things to you and performance bolstering.

Big kitchen? Big table.

Every few seconds or so there's a bit more of everything on the internet. Feeds reliably so. Reader is using Google's BigTable in order to create a haven for what is likely to be a massive trove of items. BigTable is a system for storing and managing very large amounts of structured data and Jeff Dean just gave a talk about it at the University of Washington and Andrew Hitchcock was nice enough to make a summary for those interested in an overview.

With a little help from the internet

Like many geeks, we love people tweaking, twisting, pushing a technology to be more useful in the ways that suit them best. Here's some recent favorites:

• How to use Google Reader, a Flash tutorial by Andy Wibbels
• Holizz' favelets list
• Godsmoon's bookmarklet
• Chris Nolan's Reader badges, buttons, and chicklets

If you develop anything Reader-related drop us a line. We'd be happy to post about it here. We're excited to be making Reader - most of us slept overnight at the office during launch week. It's been an amazing experience.

We're curious about one thing, though, and maybe the developers of other feed reader projects can tell us about their experience when testing their products...

How do you stop from being distracted by, well, the whole internet? It's an endless divertimento - I mean, seriously, it just keeps coming...