Google Reader Widget

[omnibot]

I know there are apps for this that are just a click away, but i think it would be a nice option to have a set widget on my desktop that automatically updates.

[ren857]

That would be cool. I use google reader more than I care to admit.

[fritz269]

I just started using google reader...

[SilleeString]

I'm married to Google Reader. We've consummated and we're expecting our first child in July.

This is how much I love Google Reader.

[footboydog]

I'm also hooked on Google Reader but I couldn't find a widget for it on the market. So I created my own: http://ubikapps.net/?page_id=69. If you have a Google Reader account then please give it a try and let me know what you think.



Cheers
Mark

[beatle7777777]

I'm also hooked on Google Reader but I couldn't find a widget for it on the market. So I created my own: http://ubikapps.net/?page_id=69. If you have a Google Reader account then please give it a try and let me know what you think.



Cheers
Mark

cool, i will defientaly go download it, thanks for making this!

[Supernova]

Nice widget, does what it says, but I have a couple of suggestions.

I'm not sure how useful displaying the most recent unread item's time is. It might be better to change the UI text to say something more informative like "8 unread notifications", as the most recent time doesn't really give us any information.

Also, it opens the browser to display the news, but the real point of a widget is it is some (sometimes misleadingly!) lightweight app that doesn't require you to open the browser etc. Would it be possible to integrate a little pop-up screen from the homepage that shows the title (expandable to full text) of the updates, that you can scroll through? A google reader client if you'd like... that would make this app great

(And mean I don't have to do it myself, as a google reader client widget is near the top of my list :P)

[footboydog]

Nice widget, does what it says, but I have a couple of suggestions.

I'm not sure how useful displaying the most recent unread item's time is. It might be better to change the UI text to say something more informative like "8 unread notifications", as the most recent time doesn't really give us any information.

Also, it opens the browser to display the news, but the real point of a widget is it is some (sometimes misleadingly!) lightweight app that doesn't require you to open the browser etc. Would it be possible to integrate a little pop-up screen from the homepage that shows the title (expandable to full text) of the updates, that you can scroll through? A google reader client if you'd like... that would make this app great

(And mean I don't have to do it myself, as a google reader client widget is near the top of my list :P)

Thanks for trying it and for the feedback. I thought about the unread item time alot. It can be confusing I know but I wanted something that provided a little more info than just the unread count and it was in the API for the taking. How about dispaying minutes since newest unread item or would that be more confusing?

As for creating a light weight Reader client, I have thought about it but this widget took me long enough! It would be cool if it synced for offline reading as well (Google could do this on the Android version of the Reader site with Gears for mobile but for some reason they haven't yet). I want to make a larger widget as well that displays the unread counts of each tag in Reader and maybe has a manual refresh button.

[Supernova]

May I ask where you found the documentation for the Google Reader API?

How about dispaying minutes since newest unread item or would that be more confusing?

Perhaps something saying "X unread, X new today" would be more useful? One day I might not check the reader but if I knew here were 10 items today I might think to check as lots of interesting things are currently going on.

The difficulty in creating a lightweight client will be proportional to the quality of the documentation for the API and the type of methods available, I shall have a look if you send me the link

It would be cool if it synced for offline reading as well (Google could do this on the Android version of the Reader site with Gears for mobile but for some reason they haven't yet).

This could probably be done now without Gears. Maintaining synchronicity between a browser and a single device isn't such a huge problem. It's only a problem between systems with loads of users on the same data... for instance I doubt more than one person will be using the same google reader account. Because of this, you could store the (say) latest 30 feed stories in the local database. If you were offline you can read from the database and cache "Delete" commands to be used later. The deleted news items can be moved to another table which can be checked whenever the network connection is regained, then issue the delete command. If something was deleted on the browser it would remain in the android client though, you could check if an item has been deleted manually but I doubt it really matters as the item will disappear in 30 messages time anyway

Does that make sense? It all depends on this API ofcourse, I wasn't aware that google had released one!

Heh, edit: I realise I am throwing quite a lot up into the air, they're just ideas If you want to have a go at implementing them then that's fine with me.... but I forgot to say well done for the work you've already done ;D

[footboydog]

The API is sort of unofficial but I got most of my info from here: http://code.google.com/p/pyrfeed/wiki/GoogleReaderAPI

Its a python client for the API but I used the documentation.

Its definitely possible to do a client that gets all the info in reader. It would take multiple calls to the API though. You would have to hit http://www.google.co.uk/reader/api/0/unread-count, parse out all the unread stuff and hit the URLs for them e.g. http://www.google.com/reader/atom/fe...om.google/read.

Oh and what I said about Gears: if I spent lots of time developing an offline Google Reader client and then suddenly Google does it anyway using Gears then it might be a lot of time wasted!