Google Reader is Google’s pretty snazzy AJAX aggregator. You knew they had to do something, this is it. For the most part it’s not bad. I prefer the aforementioned Gregarius — I like scanning more than one item at a time, I like the ease with which I can clear read items — but not everyone can host their own aggregator.
There’s one truly annoying thing about Google Reader, though. Any time there’s an error somewhere it AJAXes an error bubble near the top of the screen. Like this side-by-side comparison shows (yes, it’s small and no, there’s no “full-size” version because I got lazy).
The left part of the image shows the red-ish error bubble. It pops up whenever you, for instance, click on a link and something “goes wrong” back at Google HQ, then soon thereafter it disappears and it magically goes back to the way it is on the right. That’s great, they’ve let us know that something went wrong.
Only problem is whenever that error bubble happens to pop up, it moves everything else down to make it fit. That might not seem too terrible until you realize that if, for instance, you were clicking on the “down” link in the interface you would suddenly be clicking on the “Your Subscriptions” link instead. And it’s ephemeral, it comes and goes at its own whim, so you could be happily skimming along when an error occurs and suddenly you’re staring at your subscriptions or some other non-intuitive action.
That, friends, is what we call “piss-poor UI design.” AJAX may be wonderous but it doesn’t necessarily protect you from incorrect design decisions.
Because… I… don’t know.
Good idea Ron!
I agree that this is annoying, but why don’t you just hit “j” to move to the next item? (Along those lines, it is also quite irritating that it has to be a lower case “j” as the work that I do requires me to have CAPS LOCK on.)
I agree that the UI needs some work, but like most Google applications, it is still in beta.