I have been using Gmail as my primary non-work email platform for as long as I can remember like many people I find that it rocks! In fact I find this with many of Google’s tools with the exception of G Calender and Google Reader .
While I have begun to use the Calendar more and more I am yet to find a good way of integrating it with my work Exchange calender, CompanionLink just does not get all the timezones right during the sync, but more on that later. The other Google product Google Reader I just found the UI just strange and I have already been through so many RSS readers that the thought of changing just makes me cringe!
Over the last few weeks there have been some changes within the Reader tool. A completely new UI was released that made a bit of a stir within the blogosphere, I had a quick look but still no switch.
Then a few days ago I discovered a small tweak to Reader made by Winston from Singapore . He had modified a Greasemonkey script provided by one of the Google Reader team, Mihai Parparita to combine Gmail and Google Reader into a single screen, I was interested. (If you don’t know what Greasemonkey is check out the Wikipedia entry for some background, in short it is a series of Javascripts that change the way a web page works.) Reader shows your feeds in a single views in a “River of News” style.
Now I have moved all of my feeds into Reader and use Reader as my main RSS client one of the best things is I can now have my feeds sync’d between multiple computers. The Greasemonkey implementation is not without it’s nuances but the benefits out way them many times over.
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Cameron Reilly // Nov 27, 2006 at 8:38 am
Dude have you checked out Scheduleworld yet for synching GCal and Outlook? I got it working over the weekend. Very cool.
2 Michael Specht // Nov 27, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I have an account, just a bit overloaded with all the features!
But I have a few Next Actions to get this puppy up and running to see what happens.
3 Google Reader and the bad blogger at Michael Specht - discussions on HR and technology // Nov 28, 2006 at 6:05 am
[...] It is offical I am in LOVE with Google Reader, just like GMail, Google Reader rocks. It is fast, easy to use and allows me to read my feeds how I want to. This is very important. Why cause I control how the application works not the other way around. I suspect that this is because Google developers are, as Mitch Denny blogger last week, in tune with their users, the question is are are their users advanced or mainstream and will that impact their long term success? Or is Google building their products so that the expert features are nicely hidden and then allow the average user just to get on with using the tool? User Interface is such an important part of any application. I also really, really like the GreaseMonkey script that allows me to have Google Reader and GMail in the same window. Second quick update, I am a bad blogger. I have just not been writing here which is really not like me. So what is up? [...]
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