If you're like us, you have to read long blocks of text on a monitor all the time, and it's kind of a pain for your eyes. E-books and long PDF articles would be great if they could somehow get diced into neat, readable columns. Hey, it works for newspapers. Well, Tofu brings that pleasant reading experience to the Mac.

In a nutshell, Tofu cuts up what you're reading -- whether it's a PDF, a doc, or a chunk of text you've selected -- into columns. This is a good, because monitors are wider than the human eye is really comfortable with, and columns fit the text into your optimal scanning area for easy reading. Tofu's full screen mode and adjustable text size and colors are crucial, too. This app is good enough that we'll think twice before printing out something we can just read in Tofu.

Monday Google unveiled yet another beta site. Google Reader is now formatted for the iPhone. iPhone users tired of pinching and stretching and tapping text only links in the normal version of Reader or dealing with the plain Classic mobile version of Reader can head over to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to check out the new beta site.

With the iPhone-enabled web-app, Google joins Ask.com in the web-based RSS reader marketplace. Ask.com's Bloglines has had an iPhone version available to users since July 19, 2007. iBloglines was created with less than a 1000 lines of code on a lark by an internal developer who bought an iPhone and wanted better access to the site.

It's part of our culture to want to get more done in less time, so it's unsurprising RSS readers are so popular nowadays. But what happens when efficiency and productivity start to replace general happiness? Well, that's what happened to a long time web publisher/surfer known as Halsted (AKA Cygnoir), who recently became fed up with her RSS addiction.

"I dread opening my RSS reader these days," she posted the day before giving up on RSS. "Right now there are 876 unread items glaring at me, from a total of 269 feeds." As of this writing, the brave soul has managed to get through about a week without relying on a reader -- you laugh, but some of us are truly addicted!

RSS and other technologies are often praised for their ability to save time, effort, etc, but it seems many forget their limits when they get into the habit of turning free time into work time -- all the time. This gets us wondering: How many feeds is one too many, and -- for all the RSS addicts out there -- how often do you check your feeds?

Adobe had teamed up with Kinkos FedEx to print documents over the internet, unfortunately this move upset smaller printing companies.

The FedEx printing option had begun in Acrobat 8.1 and Reader 8.1 in June. However, complaints from rival businesses has forced Adobe to rethink their partnership with Kinko's and initiate a plan to take the feature out by an October release.

FedEx Kinko's will continue to distribute a version of the Adobe Reader with the special printing feature on its website.

Online applications are great, but what happens when you can't get a connection to the internet? Whether it is because you are on an airplane, or in the middle of nowhere camping, and have to get certain emails, calendar items, or files, you are quite possibly out of luck. Its sure a bummer, and one of the reasons why so many people are hesitant about using online applications for their most important information.

Now Imagine being able to take your online applications, offline, and store that data locally in a completely searchable database? Google is making this possible with Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide complete offline functionality. Google hopes that developers will use this new toolset to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs to store and serve the applications resources locally, as well as store data in searchable databases. All of the syncing runs in the background without burning out the browsers memory usage, or slowing anything down.

The Google Gears Beta is currently available for installation on Windows XP,Vista, as well as on Mac and Linux machines. The plug-in works with Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+. Google's first stop with Gears is Reader, with JavaScript APIs getting released shortly for data storage for use in applications like Docs and Spreadsheets.

The official Google Gears announcement will be made tomorrow to over 5,000 developers at Google's Developer Day gathering.

Since Google Reader began reporting actual numbers of subscribers, we have since found out that it's actually one of the most popular web-based readers. That said, one of its least popular features has been its ability to email a feed item you're looking at. Reader would typically pop up a Gmail window, which in itself wasn't such a bad thing, but the message being sent was mostly mashed together gobbly-gook containing a 'This item was sent to you by a Google Reader...' message, along with the entire text of the post you were reading. Nearly anyone who's used the feature would likely agree that this was not the prettiest way to share something via email with your friends and colleagues. Adding insult to injury, it seemed like a trivial thing for Google to fix this feature; they simply could have tweaked the template that creates the Gmail message to contain maybe just a link to the feed item. Easy enough, right?

Well Google, staying true to their form, finally wound up doing much more than making a few changes to a template; they have completely revamped Google Reader's email feature to offer a vastly improved experience. Clicking 'Email' on an item now displays an in-line email compose window, complete with the ability to pull names and addresses out of your Gmail account. As for what the message actually sends, Google also went above and beyond by including the news item in its entirety; headline, pictures, links - the whole nine yards. While this might not be such great news to those who use plain-text email clients and services, Google is probably betting that most recipients of Reader-shared messages are using Gmail or some other form of capable client.

The new email features should be live and kicking for all Google Reader users, as we noticed them already enabled on our accounts.

Big Apple fan? How about taking that obsession online with you while feed reading. Hicksdesign -- a small new media company -- has developed a new theme to make Google's online feed reader resemble a Mac OSX application. Installation is pretty simple, and should be up and running in a few minutes.

The theme is supported in Firefox, Camino, Safari, Omniweb, and Opera, hows that for compatible. Full instructions can be found on the Hicksdesign website.

[via GoogleSystem]

For a long time now, Google Reader has sat in the camp with other online RSS clients who unfortunately don't (or more correctly: couldn't) report the number of readers subscribed to a feed. This of course can frustrate publishers, as they only see one collective hit from Google Reader instead of an actual number of their readers using that client.

As of this morning, however, the Official Google Reader Blog has changed all of that. In fact, the gReader team has not only enabled their crawler to report an actual number of feed subscribers, that number also includes users who are simply subscribed to a feed via Google Homepage.

Not content to stop at mere numbers, the Google Reader team have also created a Tips for Publishers page that offers ideas for best practices, feed implementation, feed "auto-discovery" and even a few catches to look out for.

It might not have been the much-requested search update that gReader users are salivating for, but these new features should certainly put a smile on most publishers' faces.

Since I'm a card-carrying Google Reader convert, I've been loosely following the discussions in its Google Group. I'm constantly impressed with how active some of their engineers like Chris and Mihai are in the conversation, and just the other day they announced some small but much-requested updates and bug fixes to Reader, including:

• First and foremost: An "Add to folder" menu after using the subscribe bookmarklet, the Firefox 2.0 subscribe button and the "Add to Google" button
• The "Feed actions..." menu lets you rename the feed and change its folders
• Some IE 7 display bugs have been fixed
• Some IE 6 display bugs have been fixed
• OPML import should be more tolerant of invalid characters
• The filtering that can be done in the settings page now handles multiple terms (separate them with spaces)
• The settings page should display faster when you have lots of subscriptions

Nothing major, though that 'Add to folder' button is a God-send (Google-send?) for adding new subscriptions and easily filing them away without breaking one's workflow.

In the hunt for the newest headlines all in one convenient place, the race might just have been won. OriginalSignal has relaunched with a slick new interface, and some bright colors, to bring the world a fresh look at the newest hot news headlines. Users can now choose between five categories. Web, Technology, World, Business and Entertainment. Each with sub categories that serve up to 15 feeds from top blogs and news sites in each. As an added convenience, OriginalSignal has added in hover states where the first few lines of the story are displayed on mouseover. So, if you're on the lookout for a start page you might want to add this one to your list.

[Via TechCrunch]

AOL now has their AJAX-based RSS feed reader available for try-out. I am not so sure how viable it is, since it wouldn't let me click "add" after I had selected my feeds for reading (during the initial sign-in). Seemed to be a problem with Firefox 2, but IE6 worked just fine. I don't see much advantage yet over many of the feed readers out there, Google Reader, Bloglines, GreatNews, NewsGator, and the like. This reader is so far very minimalist, which I suppose could turn into a good product, except I would expect to see a lot more "deal-breaker" features included on the first test run (which this is). The feed reader demo requires an AOL screenname (what doesn't at AOL these days?). Another thing I am not so fond of is the huge feed titles, that apparently you can't change. The titles are blue and way too big, taking up valuable screen real estate, especially on a laptop display. The verdict here? Not quite ready for prime time, it is a nice idea, but I wouldn't use it for every day feed reading just yet.

Disclosure: AOL is the parent company of the Weblogs, Inc. network and this blog.

I don't have a good view to check (I live just outside Denver, CO), but I swear Google's campus must be on fire, what with unleashing their gadgets, a new groups beta, code search, a new company focus and now acquiring YouTube. It was just a week ago that they also whipped out a major update to Reader which was enough to convince me to switch from my long-time Mac desktop favorite, and now they've gone and quickly updated it again based on feedback from their discussion group.

Users can now set their own launch page, with the ability to chose between their Home page, All Items or any folder/tag. Completely hiding the left column that houses navigation and the folder list is also possible with a mere keyboard shortcut, as is auto-refreshing of feeds with a dedicated button and web 2.0-certified UI feedback when folders and feeds update. Last but not least is the return of the space bar; it now scrolls through long articles and selects the next headline in the list (and yes, shift-space rolls backwards).

Check out the announcement post for more details, or dive in if you haven't tried the new Google Reader yet.

Google has announced what is quite possibly the largest update to Google Reader since its inception, bringing an entirely new UI, more keyboard shortcuts, new bookmarklets and a whole lotta results from user feedback to the table. Overall, as a Google Reader fan for some time, I am pleasantly surprised by this wholly positive and usable update, but it isn't without a few confusing quirks.

The first and most noticeable update is the radical change to Google Reader's UI, bringing it more in line with the tried and tested UI of many other online readers, but still with much of the Google engineers' unique genius baked in everywhere. Above you can see Reader has adopted the typical folder/grouping system on the left, while headlines can be listed on the right.

The Spring Box is a widget engine for the web and for the desktop that is just plain sprung (sorry, I grew up near Chicago, so I still know a little street slang). The product is in beta, so you know it is cool like all the other roller-shoe wearing kids, but this also means there are not a lot of widgets available for consumption just yet. There is an API for developers that you can use (developer skills preferable) to make your own widgets, available by contacting the company. Currently the list of widgets you can use are: RSS reader, NFL GameTrax, Scoreboard, Clock. You can embed the widgets anywhere that accepts code such as MySpace, Faces.com, Friendster, Xanga, and many more or download the engine to use on your desktop. One idea Spring Box may want to explore is some way to display Yahoo or other widgets on their engine, to allow integration across other widget-works (if at all possible). So check it out and start gettin' sproingy with it!