Google Reader

Shortly after I started using Linux as my main operating system, at the end of last summer, I got fed up with the huge number of webcomics I was checking every day.

I had heard that RSS would be a good solution to this¹, so I decided to give it a try. After a while, I managed to find the RSS feeds of all the webcomics that had them², and life was good.

Since I was using Gnome and the Firefox live bookmark-style feed-reading wasn’t the style I wanted, I used Liferea, the Linux feed reader. I continued to use it up until a couple days ago.

The thing that made me finally abandon it is pretty simple: it wasn’t a good program.

I don’t mean to offend the good developers. I’m sure it’s quite a challenge to create a full desktop app that’s even functional, let alone one that works smoothly and nicely. And Lifey is certainly functional.

Really, all that I mean when I say that it’s not a good program is that it lacks that unquantifiable sort of polished feeling you get from really great programs. It did what it was supposed to do, and it did it without any major bugs or even many minor ones.

The thing is, it wasn’t a joy to use. It didn’t seem to go out of its way to anticipate your needs, to provide solutions to problems you didn’t even know you had. I don’t think there was a single time that I found some new capability or encountered some UI with Lifey that made me spontaneously exclaim, “that’s fantastic.”

That may not seem so impressive, but I’m pretty prone to spontaneous expressions of awe. Some applications evoke one every couple of days.

I’ve felt this way for a while, but I haven’t made the switch to something else because apparently there aren’t really any other decent feed aggregators for Linux, and Google Reader, which several folks I know use, couldn’t integrate with Gnome. I needed to be able to glance at gnome-panel to see whether I had any new feeds.

However, a couple days ago, I realized that since I was using wmii, gnome-panel wasn’t running anymore. Clearly I didn’t need that aspect of Lifey, so I exported my OPML file and headed to the “cloud³.”

I’ve always been a little wary of long-running web apps. I don’t like the idea of having an extra tab sitting around taking up space, but if I give it its own window, Firefox will want to open links in that one after I’ve touched it. Plus I restart Firefox occasionally for new addons or to clear its memory, and I don’t really want the app dieing along with it.

Luckily, Mozilla labs has come up with a solution: an application they’re calling Prism (Linux and OSX binaries are linked from the wiki). Basically, it’s a browser without actually being a browser. It has the most basic features of a browser: the ability to access URLs, render HTML (with Gecko, the same engine Firefox uses), and run Javascript. But it has no user interface to speak of.

The location bar is invisible by default. There are no back and forward buttons. There are certainly no bookmarks, no search, etc.

The idea is that Prism lets web apps act like desktop apps. The most obvious way this works is that it puts all the focus on the app at hand. It’s not something you just browse to and see; the web app pretty much is the application.

It can get even more advanced, bundling the online component with offline Javascript that can access client-side databases and so forth. But all I’m using it for is Google Reader, which just involves starting it, pointing it to google.com/reader, and letting it go.

So far, this is working quite well. I like Google Reader much more than Lifey. Its UI certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s generally pleasant to use.

My only qualm with the setup is a very small one. When I click a feed link in Prism, it opens up a Firefox tab. This is great: Firefox has adblock and so forth, and is the application for browsing the web. However, when I use Reader’s otherwise-handy “v” shortcut to view the feed, which should have the same effect as clicking the link, it opens up another Prism window instead. Just a little annoying.

One really cool thing about Google reader is its “shared items” feature. Anyone can mark an item (post, article, you know – one of those individual things that makes up a feed) as “shared.” Then other folks can subscribe to your shared items and see what you think is cool.

If you’re interested, you can check out my shared items, or subscribe to the feed. If you’re reading this, I’d reccomend you do so; they tend to be much more interesting than I am.

And, hey, if you’re using Google Reader, let me know what your shared items feed is. I promise I won’t make fun of what you find interesting⁴.

Anyway, merry Christmas, jolly Yule, delightful Secular Gift-Giving and Evergreen Tree-Enjoying Day, and a pleasantly wonderful whatever-else-you-may-celebrate. Or just happy day if you don’t celebrate anything at all.

¹ I hadn’t heard of Atom at the time, although I now prefer it to RSS as a publication format.

² May the fire of a thousand suns rain down upon people who have an RSS feed but neglect to add a link to it in the head of their document, this preventing browsers from detecting its existance.

³ For those unfamiliar, Google and various other folks have been going on about the cloud lately. Apparently it’s another word for the internet or what Microsoft was calling web services or something like that. Sounds a little like marketing fluff to me.

⁴ ...to your face.