AJAX is not for everything

 

I have over 1000 feeds now and I have been using RSS Bandit exclusively for reading my feeds. Since I have been away from my home computer for sometime now I decided to import my opml to google reader.

I have used their older version and found it to be completely useless. Eventhough I know that rss reading is different from emails, I needed the ability to mark items as read so that I can keep my rss reading list tidy. I guess this would be the most basic feature that was absent in the older google reader.

<rant>Since I saw the announcement for the new google reader I thought I’ll give it a second chance. The stupid reader crawls with my list. AJAX is more of an annoyance than a feature here. I wish there was a way to turn the AJAX off and give the plain simple HTML page. I can live with postbacks but crashing and unresponsive browsers is most annoying. People behind the AJAX bandwagon please realize that AJAX is not the panacea for poor interface. Just because its cool doesn’t mean it could work everywhere. I guess two sloppy applications from google are the spreadsheets (why use an online spreadsheet when U can attach an Excel file in a email?) and google reader. </rant>

Google maps are great, not the best in directions.. but the street level views is cool. 

I highly recommend bloglines. By far the fastest web based rss reader. Minor annoyances with the UI is something I can trade off with the speed at which it displays my rss items…no more chocking browsers.

 

btw.. the last two posts were published from Windows Live Writer which rocks! One of the sweetest applications I have used. Simple, Intuitive (I haven’t hit the F1 key) and fast. Great job on this MS!