The way to have Google Reader on Mac OS X
Posted on January 18, 2009 by admin
In recent weeks, on my Polish blog I addressed the issue of RSS readers for Mac. The first of these – Headline – was available at the MacHeist.com Givingtree. Unfortunately, Headline as a separate RSS reader does not allow convenient synchronization between multiple computers and iPhone. This solution is a web RSS reader, which does not require synchronization between multiple computers and iPhone. Of course, the solution comes from uncle Google, the web application called Google Reader. Reading RSS via a web page has never been for me a convenient solution. It does not concern me as much as web interface, but to use a regular web browser. I started to use ReadAir, a Google Reader client written in the Adobe Air environment. Unfortunately, relatively intense use of the reader has revealed some of its drawbacks: the absence of sound signals, the lack of integration with Growl (ie the notification) or the lack of access to the program through the menu bar. Unfortunately, it turned out that ReadAir likes to secretly freeze, the symptom was not sending information about the changes (such as asterisks mark selected messages or read about information) to Google Reader. In a resultI had to go through all of those news that I have read and search for those who want to add to your favorites. I decided to say Good Bye to ReadAir and to be friend with the Google Reader.
The solution proved to be as usual Fluid, creating independent Web applications with a user-selected sites. Already discussed it on the example of Blip, so this time I won’t write much about that program. To set up the Google Reader web app nested in the menu bar took less than one minute.
Google Reader landed in the menu bar as a web application. Unfortunately for the time being Fluid does not notify of the changes on the page (information about the new or unread messages, that should appear to be next to or on the icon in the menu bar). Would also help integration with Growl. Unfortunately you can not have everything – at least for now.
So it was necessary to look for a combined solution – an application for Mac OS X, which would inform about new messages in the RSS feeds in Google Reader. At first, I’ve searched for a plugin for Firefox, but very soon I found a program that did exactly what I wanted. This program is Reader Notifier by Troels Bay. This small application nests in the menu bar in Mac OS X, not only by displaying an icon, but the number of new messages in RSS feeds. Reader Notifier integrates with Growl, further indicating the emergence of new audio messages.
Examples of integration with Growl:
Clicking on the Reader Notifier icon will pull down the menu, which could be a list of new posts in RSS feeds (optional).
