Google my Reader

I like to support mac software authors, and I’m also not a huge fan of having my apps on the internet. But I finally switched to using google reader the other day for a couple reasons, and so far I’m more impressed than I thought I’d be. Part of that is my lowered expectations for rss readers these days though.

I’ve used a variety of rss readers on the mac – the now non-existant NewsMac Pro, by ThinkMac software, NewsFire, and more recently, NewsLife (again by ThinkMac). Below is a partial screen capture of NewsLife.

NewsLife is a great little app in a lot of ways, but it’s frustrating in others. OPML export doesn’t work yet – it’s in there, and it acts like it works, it just never actually creates a file for you.

Also, if you are reading a post in a feed, and you want to mark the feed read, you can’t – not unless you click on the feed name again to get out of the specific post and back to the article listing view for the feed.

Performing “Mark feed as read” while at this level won’t work:

At this level, “Mark feed as read” does work:

Anyway, among other things, I thought as long as I would be trying to sneak peaks at my rss feed at work, and you know I will, I might as well make it easy on myself. So I started entering feeds into google reader one by one (remember – NewsLife’s OPML export doesn’t work?!??).

Things I like:

I like the default views for the reader – the aggregate folder views and the rss feed listing views.

Things I don’t like:

I’m not so nuts about the “manage subscriptions” view as with hundreds of feeds it could quickly grow unweildy.

I also don’t like that, once you create a folder, it doesn’t seem possible to rename or delete that folder. What am I missing?

Adding a feed is easy enough:

After that, you can move it to a folder easily, as the newly added feed is shown in article list view for you:

Because you are in a browser, the feed and article listings show any posts that have images and layout just as your browser would – because it is your browser!

I’m happy enough with google reader that, well… the picture below says it all.

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computers, Blog, rss, software