Google Reader gets UI face lift, settings page

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Web services, Google

Google Reader gets UI face lift, settings page

by David Chartier Jun 28th 2006

Google Reader has received a major UI overhaul and joined its sibling Google apps with the introduction of a full-blown "Settings" page. Users finally have a powerful management panel for their Subscriptions and Labels, allowing batch operations for deleting, renaming and shuffling subscriptions around. The Google Reader team even went so far as to allow you to toggle whether animations play when you're using gReader.

The face lift doesn't stop at Google Reader's settings and preferences though. There is a new Labels menu to accompany Subscriptions, and both are ripe with AJAX-y pull-down goodness. Gone is that clunky Subscriptions section that folds out; now they're both handy menus that allow you to chose single feeds or entire labels. But if you aren't a menu and mousing kind of reader, the translucent label selector you can access from a keyboard shortcut (g + l) is still present.

All in all this is a spectacular (and necessary) update to my personal favorite of the online newsreader offerings. Call me crazy, but I think this finally makes Google Reader feel like it has the necessary features to stack up to the competition - even though it's still in the Labs.

Tags: google, greader, labels, reader, rss, settings, subscriptions, UI, update, upgrade

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

vanbollu said 11:14AM on 6-28-2006

walking pass.

Robert said 1:19PM on 6-28-2006

Once they add some sort of "mark all read" function, Reader will be great. After a long weekend or vacation, it can be a real pain to clean up old articles you want to skip - you have to click on them one by one to make them go away.

David Chartier said 1:31PM on 6-28-2006

You could always use the 'j' and 'k' shortcuts to move forward and back through headlines. It isn't nearly as handy as a 'mark all as read' button, but it might help cut down on mousing. They have a ton of keyboard shortcuts available, actually - that's part of the reason I love Reader so much. Check out their Help for the low-down.

mark said 2:49PM on 6-28-2006

Robert-

It's not perfect, but I have a greasemonkey script called "auto-read". It is a link in Reader that when you click it on, starts marking items as read, one every second or so until you click it off. It takes a little while to get through tons of unread posts, but it's better than sitting there and pressing "j" for an hour. Anyhow, you can get the script here:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2035

David Chartier said 4:42PM on 6-28-2006

Slick script Mark. I notice there's a ton of gReader scripts available that do some great stuff, like adding a 'post to delicious' menu item and allowing a mouse scrollwheel to mark items as read. Just check out everything at UserScripts tagged 'googlereader':

http://userscripts.org/tags/googlereader

Garold said 7:34PM on 6-28-2006

The real question is, have they fixed all the OTHER problems. Whenever I use Google Reader, it keeps bringing up the same blog entries over and over, missing blog entries, putting them in the wrong order, and in general just messing things up and making it a pain to actually find what I want to read.

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