New Features:
Google made some major updates to Google Reader which makes it really usable. Before it was a bit awkward and didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Now it looks great and functions exactly how you think it should, here are the features I really like:
- You can access it anywhere
- Good HTML Support (you’d think this would be obvious but then you must not have used embedded IE)
- Embedded mp3 Support – I have a lot of podcasts in my feeds, this makes it really handy to listen to the short ones as I process my articles
- Keyboard shortcuts – this is probably the best feature – my hands don’t leave the keyboard
My Workflow:
Here’s how I work. I process first, I just determine whether the article is interesting and open it, I read later:
- Shift + N -> Move to the next feed
- Shift + O -> Open that feed
- Spacebar -> page through the feed (Possibly doing a Shift + A to mark all read if it bores me)
- v -> opens that articles link in a new tab (with Firefox obviously)
Summary:
Google Reader has replaced SharpReader which was my desktop feed reader for years (Rant: To mark all read in SharpReader its Ctrl+Shift+R – human hands weren’t meant to contort like that!) It’s a very efficient way of managing my current RSS feeds and has saved me quite a bit of time. Google always amazes me. I thought Reader was a very mediocre product but they really redeemed themselves and pulled off an excellent transformation with this release.
[tags]google, google reader, rss, sharpreader, gtd, feeds[/tags]