Google Reader Rocks
I’m constantly looking for software or utilities that will improve my productivity. From trying out new languages to learning new development tools, nothing is out of bounds. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that there aren’t any magic bullets out there. Nothing will magically make the pain points go away. Yet every now and then I come across a piece of software that is so well designed I wonder why everyone isn’t using it. Google Reader is that application for me. I am thoroughly impressed with how well it works for keeping up on my feeds.
One of the biggest benefits of Google Reader for me is that it’s a web application. I have four computers that I move back and forth between pretty regularly (a work desktop, a work laptop, a home desktop, and a home laptop). So it’s important to have everything available over the network for me. All of my important code, scripts, and documents are kept in a subversion repository so I can easily move between machines and access them.
Feed Readers on the other hand have been a big problem for me. I’ve bounced back and forth between several different options. Online feed readers, clientside feed readers, manually visiting sites. Of the Online feed readers I’ve tried before Google Reader, I haven’t liked the flow. They have all felt bulky or hard to use. The desktop clients are typically more fluid but either aren’t cross platform (OS X on my laptops and Windows XP on my desktops) or the pain of trying to manage the feeds across multiple machines has been too much. The final option of visiting the sites manually suffers from scaling problems. I usually forget to visit sites after a period of time if the author hasn’t updated in a while.
Google feed reader though solves all of those problems. It’s a network application, so it’s natively available on all the machines I use. The interface is amazingly slick, and very easy to work with. It of course also makes it so I can scale the sites I’m reading by at least an order of magnitude over what I can do manually. If you haven’t given Google Reader a try, I highly recommend it.