Google Reader, That’s It?
Google released their new Google Gears app, which allows you to use some of their apps offline.
Neat right? Too bad it currently only works with Google Reader. And too bad it working with Google Reader kinda sucks.
In order to get it to work, you have to install Google Gears, that’s a given. Once it’s installed, you go to Google Reader, and it asks you if you want to allow this to access Google Gears, which it proceeds to not remember, so everytime you go to Google Reader, you’re presented with the same damn dialog. After that, you have to click the green arrow at the top, which sometimes doesn’t show up for reasons unbeknownst to me. It’ll then download the last 2000 entries sending a crap load of XMLHttp requests, which would sometimes cause Firefox to hang a bit. Once it finishes all that, you then can go offline.
Great. If I ever want to use it offline, I just have to make sure I know I’m going offline, and prepare for it accordingly. A spontaneous outage? You ain’t reading shit. Happen to close Firefox? You’re also screwed. Anything that didn’t allow you to meticulously follow each step, you’re offline reader is useless.
And even if you were able to follow all the steps, it’s still not that useful. Any sort of media won’t load.
Useless
Online
Maybe I shouldn’t expect or want them to download the media, but since most posts consist of some sort of media, the whole offline experience is degraded.
What if the site doesn’t provide a full content feed? It’s basically pointless. And what about link sites like digg or reddit? Those are useless offline.
But what’s most suprising about this is that Google Reader still doesn’t have a search feature. Seriously, you’re a search engine company, yet you guys don’t have one. With the exception of Analytics, which I’m not sure how a search would be implemented, Reader is the only one without a search feature. Maybe how you wrote, it would be hard to implement it, but you’re fucking Google. Fix it.
0 Comments to “Google Reader, That’s It?”
No Comments. Send your comment.
Leave a Reply