New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing
googlereader.blogspot.com
googlereader.blogspot.com
I was part of a community of people I liked, and now, after I clicked a button, that was gone. I miss those people already. I don't recall anything on the text that clearly said "oh yeah, stuff will be gone, including your friends, and we meant to do that."
If I want to share now, I have to do so publicly with the Internet or click a "share" button way in the upper right and then build up groups. There does not seem to be an easy way to get my friends back and to get them into a reader feed. I apparently have to look at my G+ feed if a friend sends me an item. I do not seem to have any convenient way to filter out those useful posts from all the spam of G+.
I had easy access to search a list of things that I had found interesting over the years, and now, I guess I'm going to have to find another program to even look at that. I do appreciate that it was not outright destroyed, so thanks for that kindness.
Visually, I'm baffled. Apparently, grey and slightly darker grey are now visually effective colors for distinguishing things. I can, of course, adjust to this but overall it does not instill me with confidence.
I am, obviously, now looking for a way back to what I had this morning. If someone figures that out, I'll thank them. If it's something that needs support, I'll support it.
Google -1 on this one.
(and yeah, the new grey-on-grey style is really bad and depressing.)
That's just classic Edward Tufte design aesthetics.
You can still download everything you had before and it wouldn't be much work to put all those followers/followees(?) into a circle and share with just them. Although I do agree that should have been done automatically.
Were they email contacts? Did I accidentally friend some people on a Reader-specific social network at some point?
If anybody out there has a social RSS reader start-up, feel free to reply to this and advertise your service. I will drag my friends to it along with me.
(Yes, I use Twitter, Instapaper, news aggregate sites, etc. Yes social software has changed how i would otherwise discover links/news. But I still need an RSS reader, and the passive sharing in old Google Reader is a layer of social that one takes for granted in almost any app. I get why they took it out (they think they're helping G+), but it doesn't work for me.)
Also, that doesn't solve the problem that others can't comment on the shared item.
But it doesn't solve the discovery part- having a place where I can see everything my friends are sharing- unless they do it too.
I already tried Tiny Tiny RSS and NewsBlur but I don't really like them. There's rssLounge left, I'll try it tomorrow if I have enough time. Does anyone knows another one of these opensource webapp feed aggragator?
For now, I'll continue sharing using icebraining tips (to create a tag).
In Google Reader, I liked to look at all the feeds in a category and just see all the posts from each of those feeds in the reading pane, most recent first. I can almost do the same thing in NewsBlur with the "river of news," but it only shows me unread posts, which is usually OK but it's nice sometimes to be able to easily scroll back and re-read an older post without having to go dig up that feed.
Is there a way you could add an option to replicate the Reader-like behavior of showing the posts in a folder chronologically?
In terms of social features, you can make any interest public and share it with others. You can also follow or fork any of the public interests (like Github).
We are in early stages with the social features (and overall product) and would really appreciate any feedback/input! You can email me at mjfern@intigi.com or use the feedback button throughout the site.
Thanks in advance!
Sigh. You guys keep doing this, and sooner or later some EU commissioner with half a brain will crack down on the practice, and then we'll all be poorer.
The service itself wasn't bad (I had some feedback that was likewise ignored/brush off), but I would never recommend them to anyone for this reason alone.
the topmost the feed content can be read is ~193px from the top of the browser. And you can't scroll down because of the way the page it built.
Here is what firebug told me:
29px - account bar
59px - search bar
73px - feed toolbar
32px - feed title bar (in the reading pane)On a 13inch Macbook add the Mac App bar, Chrome (tabs + search-url + bookmarks toolbar) a third of the readable area is covered with "bars".
NOTE: I haven't checked to see if this plugin still works on the new google reader design.
To my surprise, there's often lots of very informing stuff on economic/political questions I might search about; it's like consulting my own private network of expert commentary, and is often more useful to me than google search.
#top-bar { display: none; }
#viewer-header { display: none; }- You interacted with that subset of your friends (and their friends) that cared enough about reading to use this weird software.
- You could read your hand-selected feeds, share items and read others' shares in the same place. It was social reading. Now the reading and the social aspect are divorced.
Divorcing the social aspect from the RSS reader makes sense. Social reading should be a subset of Google+, not a layer on top of Google Reader. Google should improve the reading articles aspect of Google+ (Sparks or whatever seemed DOA), yes, but the overarching concept is very sound.
* you could view the shared items and their comments in the same interface.
Not sure how G+ handle this, but when multiple people share the same article, it will often show only once in Shared Items.
The old system had flaws but it worked. Firstly, I'm not against G+ integration if it meant both products were improved. However, this change looks to me like forcing a whole lot of Reader users to begrudgingly use G+. Reader's social features were not improved; only removed other than a "share to G+".
Not replacing the following system with an interface into G+ so that you can view and comment on friends' submissions from Reader is annoying. Reader was my social network. Why are they forcing me to go open G+ in a new tab everyday to see if my friends had shared anything? That's the _very_ reason I use a feed aggregator. Google doesn't provide any way to view streams in Reader (to my knowledge. I would really love to be wrong here); the only way is probably to use a third party method with no guarantee to not break every time Google touches the G+ code.
Edit: additionally, when viewing shared items on Reader, Reader tries to get the article or picture in. Now, not only do you have to go to G+, it only gives you a link rather than try to fit the article or picture onto the post. Irritating.
The physical separation between the item you're sharing and the screen element you have to click to share it strikes me as rather counter-intuitive.
My problem with the new Reader is the lack of visual indication of read vs unread items.
Yeah, I had a few people complaining in my twitter timeline and I thought, "Everyone always bitches when something new gets rolled out. It can't be that bad, come on." I logged in and I wasn't impressed but it was he lack of read vs. unread that pushed me over the edge.
Here's the main kicker of that: What's the point of marking the unread count on the left hand sidebar if there's no way to see which ones in the main view? This is what makes me think it's half-baked. They half-removed a feature.
Blogs. Posts.
-------+---------
blog1 | Unread post (b on w)
blog2=>| Old post. (b on g)
Upon close examination, the headline text (not background) for unread is black on white, while the headline for read is very dark grey text on white. The headline for the item being currently read is also black on white.
The contrast is almost unnoticeable (I didn't notice it before), in particular because it's text on a bright background. I'd have to adjust my monitor gamma to make the distinction obvious, at the cost of color reproduction elsewhere. There is more variance in the shades of grey of text on my monitor from viewing angles than there is from this read / unread distinction.
The text varies between #000000 (black) and #222222 (87% black). Good luck distinguishing 87% black text on a white background from 100% black.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/RWN8fsl7HjX5SFul8mb7OJ...
So, yeah. The 'read state' of Google Reader is half-baked in expanded view.
It had stuff like:
- "Circles" aka, letting you group your contacts however you like and see what each group shared with you and share stuff with all your contacts or just certain groups.
- Feed and user discovery and recommendations. "People who read X also read:" and "Look who subscribes to this feed" type of thing.
- Keyboard shortcuts, auto discovery, opml import/export etc. All the usual feed reader stuff.
Check out this old intro video I made for it (social/interesting parts start around 1:40). The design in the video is out-dated though, it ended up looking like this, http://feedeachother.com/screenshot_500.png. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Ltwh4AO_w&feature=youtu...
Maybe I should turn it back on? Any takers?
as someone who is fairly invested in Google Reader, it pains me that this has been a UI step backwards.
It's lot less usable; defaulting every link to black, like the rest of the interface, makes scanning for links really painful, and there's still a good 130px of useless interface chrome that is taking up space for no good reason.
Blargh! Looks like I'm going to be loading some custom stylesheets very soon.
I haven't set up a style for google reader (yet) but Stylish extension for Firefox does a good job letting me customize sites. I don't use it on every site, but places I view regularly I tweak.
I have a style for news.yc http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085416
http://userstyles.org/styles/55550/google-reader-g-edition-m...
.read > .card { border: 1px solid #f357a1 !important; }
Adds a pinkish border around the cards of read items.
Also I'm not sure what prompted Google to move the star button from the left of the heading to the right. Titles are variable-length so it doesn't make sense to put a frequently used UI element in a position where it would constantly change..
I really think Google makes decisions like this: "The data says the search bar is only used occasionally. Okay, so that means it needs to be bigger so more people use it." Search in a reader is fine, but it needs to be about as prominent as "search this page" is in a browser.
Someone wrote an AppEngine service [1] to transcode Google+ to RSS, but they shut it down after Google raised the AppEngine feeds.
javascript:void(open("http://plusfeed2.appspot.com/"+location.href.match(/^https?:\/\/plus\.google\.com\/(\d{21})\/?.*$/)[1]));The new system (integration with +) is rational and a superset of the old system, as far as I can tell.
I also choose to consider this as a precursor to many rational changes/extensions to Google Reader.
Let me be clear: I am sooo glad that I can finally direct Google Reader shared items to specific groups, so I don't have to spam everyone who follows me with every single item, which pretty much guaranteed that 80% of my feed was irrelevant/stupid/boring to any given person.
Now all I need are public, topical feeds that are subscribable/discoverable. RSS, in other words.
But integration with plus is definitely a welcome change. More often than not, I've decided against sharing simply because it's inappropriate to everyone following me.
here is what my screen looks like after the redesign: http://imgur.com/ppg4o
Notice that about a third of it is used up by various chrome.
Now, I realize that every Google employee is issued two wall-sized hi-res screens the moment they step up to their desk, and quickly forgets what it was like to work using mere 21st-century technology. And if they ever use a laptop, it is always a sleek Chromebook which shows you a full-screen view of the web and a tiny, exquisitely designed window titlebar in a tasteful shade of blue.
But for those of us still stuck outside the bubble, it sure would be nice to have a way to collapse some of that whitespace....
Still wish they'd give +1 a search tool, and make all the previously shared items shared on Google+. But then again, this is power-user wishlist, and Google has been moving away from us.
This is not so bad for Google+, as it has an API, but it is terrible for Google Reader, as it still doesn't have an API. Guess this[1] issue was not starred enough on Google Code...
[1] http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=29
The first thing that struck me is how much slower this reader is. There seems to be a refresh on every new move forward, which was less noticeable on the previous version, if at all. There also seems to be a substantially slower response time, on the order of a couple of seconds.
Reader is now painful to use, imo. I'm constantly waiting for it to catch up to my actions.
Solution: Turn them into "starred items"
Details: You can only access notes or shared items from certain mobile or desktop clients. I don't know exactly which ones but the one I used was MobileRSS (iOS). Go into the "notes" folder and manually star every item (you don't need to star "shared" items because all of them are notes, but not all notes are shared items). If you want them in chronological order, you'll need to start with the oldest first, the second oldest second, etc. It took me less than 10 minutes to star my 131 items.
If you don't do this, you can't view or search for anything in "notes" or "shared items." However, you CAN view and CAN search them so long as they are starred items.
So far as I know, there is no longer a way to get content into Google Reader via the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet. It is no longer supported. This means that any site without an RSS feed cannot have any pages brought into Google Reader, so far as I can tell.
I wonder if there is a service that turns a site into an RSS feed on the fly? Then you'd be able to subscribe temporarily and star the item. Probably not convenient enough to use as a read it later (or archive in Google Reader) service, as I've been doing for the past couple years.
I've found that the easiest way to search for archive-worth web pages I've read years ago is to search my stash in Google Reader. Using a search engine doesn't always find old stuff which may be buried in search results or no longer on the web.
Today, Google Reader has made shared content a second-class feed. With the removal of the inbox-style interface, if you miss a friend's shared item on Google Plus (possibly buried in other items), it's gone. The closest you can come to a 'mark as unread' functionality is through a work-around: creating a memberless 'save for later' circle, to share items with. Furthermore, shared content isn't even visible within Google Reader.
I can't be alone in thinking this was a good interface for sharing articles. If anybody has an alternative RSS reader with this functionality, please let me know. I would pay for this, but I can see it being a tough sell generally.
Conesus, I think you've mentioned in a different thread that you have social features in the pipeline: is this something you're aiming at?
Back when I used WIndows, I used FeedReader, but I'm not sure what other programs are out there for Linux or Android that sync with Google Reader.
But damn, that color scheme is oppressive. It's the New Web Brutalism. I hope that once everything Google is using the same design template they'll offer themes again and let you have one look across all Google products. This whitewash-and-grey with carefully rationed rectangles of primaries is depressing, like a grand opening in North Korea. I'm not saying that to be funny: looking at it makes me feel gloomy and want to do...something else. I'm using Google Docs less as well, for the same reason.
#entries .entry .card-common { background: #eee} #entries .entry .card-actions { background: #eee }
#entries .entry.read .card-common { background: #fff} #entries .entry.read .card-actions { background: #fff }