New Google Reader - Disastrous for the Myopic

The new version of Google Reader has received a lot of criticism for the removed sharing capabilities. My problem is another one. I cannot read in Reader.

I routinely zoom in in most web pages, so fonts get bigger, so I actually can read text. However, when I do that in the new Google Reader, the items to read are shoved off into a small area in the bottom right corner of the screen, and they become almost impossible to read.

I can no longer remove the navigation pane to the left, and the top part of the screen has expanded with nice looking big buttons I never use. The top part took up 133 pixels before. Now it has increased by 65 useless percent to 197 pixels.

Why can I not collapse the uninteresting things on the screen? I can quickly show/hide all panels in Adobe CS5 with a simple TAB. I can show/hide the ribbon in Microsoft Word with ctrl+F1 in 2007 for Windows or ⌘+⌥+R in 2011 for Mac.

And in Google Reader (or indeed Google Doc) there is no way I can remove the clutter. Why? Oh, why? Google may not be evil, but it is cruel.

Why Kindle on Kindle is more frustrating than Kindle on Other Devices

I finally bought a Kindle device from Amazon - mainly for one single purpose: reading in sunlight.

One can read in sunlight with an iPad or iPhone, but it is not that easy, and I said to myself that life deserved to be easier in the sun, even at the cost of a Kindle device.

However, the device was surprisingly cumbersome to use:

1. I cannot hold it properly. That was the really big surprise, but I have not found any good way of holding it when I am reading. I keep pushing the page-forward and page-backward buttons by mistake all the time. Holding an iPhone is much easier, and apart from the weight, an iPad is easier to hold as well.

2. Turning pages is cumbersome. I have not found any good position for my hands so I easily can turn pages - on purpose. On an iPhone or iPad, I briefly slid my thumb a few millimetres over the screen, and the page turns as I want.

3. Looking up words is awful. On an iPhone/iPad, I just put my finger on the word I want to look up. On the Kindle device, I have to press the navigator over and over, stepping down line by line, until I get to the word I want to look up. Half of the times, I simply do not look up the words, because I cannot be bothered to spend all that time.

4. The German dictionary does not seem to be supported on the Kindle device. When I read a German book on my iPhone/iPad and look up a word, it calls a German dictionary. On the Kindle device, it optimistically searches English dictionaries even for German texts.

Then there are a number of other inconveniences like no colour photos, a bad keyboard, cumbersome screen rotation and so on.

So what are the advantages?

You can easily read it in the sun. That's about it.

Then there are minor advantages, like 3G coverage abroad, lighter weight than the iPad (but not than the iPhone), and so on. But looking only at real substantial advantages, there is only one: reading in the sun. Reading in a bus or train going through tunnels or in dark hotel rooms, the iPhone/iPad are much better devices.

So the result is that I need to carry all of them with me when I travel: iPhone, iPad, laptop, Kindle... Or I just bring a pencil and a piece of paper and write what I want to read. That must be the easiest solution.

Update May 2012: The new Kindle Touch handles all the shortcomings 1-4.

6th generation iPod nano - not that useless after all

One of the worst Apple products I have bought was the 6th generation iPod nano. It plays music alright, but the only way to stop the music was to unhook it from my shirt, activate the screen and then tap to stop/pause.

To my big surprise, Apple has now released a software update that makes my nano usable. After that update, I can pause the nano without looking at it, by just double pressing the sleep button. It is not that intuitive, but it works fine. And it took Apple just about half a year after the nano was released to make it usable.