Having removed the iPhone-optimised iGoogle to the distress of all obsessive users, such as myself, Google has redeemed itself by improving the interface it left us with slightly. A screenshot can be seen below…
The key difference to what came before is that when initially loading the page you can opt for showing a brief description of each feed before then going off the the actual source or viewing a Google hosted mobile version of the content. This is, in some ways, better than the previous version, since with just one page load you can get far more information about all your feeds, especially if you opt to add many to your homepage.
The problem is that the interface to then read the full text of the feed is a bit clunky. It just seemed like before it was only a small page load to display the content within wach feed tab. Now it has to load a whole new page and then to go back you have to reload the original homepage again.
All Google need to do now is give an additional “More” link so that you can expand the content still further. The use case for this for on the tube. I get on and load my iGoogle home page, then 2 mins later I am in a tunnel and then there is patchy coverage/am in a tunnel pretty much until I arrive at work. This means that I want to be able to load all of the feeds first and then look through them without further loading.
I know there is a BBC app that does this, but it downloads all BBC content and is not selective, and hence I would need to do this preferably on a wifi connection at home, giving enough time for it all to load. Even then I would only have BBC content. Feed readers also require continuous downloads as you browse through their feeds. Hmmmm. Rubbish.
