So I’m absolutely lov­ing Hel­ve­tireader, a free user script for turn­ing your Google Reader into a slimmed down, mod­ern feed reader. You have two options for using the script, you can down­load Greasekit, and use it in a vari­ety of web browsers (basi­cally it uses cus­tom CSS to change the way Google Reader looks); or you can use an appli­ca­tion called Fluid to turn your Google Reader into a stand-alone appli­ca­tion, styled of course to look like Helvetireader. I pre­fer using the Fluid method, sim­ply because I treat my RSS feed read­ing as a stand­alone expe­ri­ence and pre­fer not to install scripts into my Safari and worry about bug­gi­ness later from Apple.

The basis of what makes Hel­ve­tireader effec­tive and attrac­tive is of course it’s use of Hel­vetica for text clar­ity and either tak­ing away or hid­ing cer­tain Google Reader func­tions. For exam­ple, after you’re done read­ing a post you have a mul­ti­tude of options at the bot­tom of the post (i.e. Add Star, Like, Email, etc.); Hel­ve­tireader hides this option until you hover over the area, so unless you choose to do one of these things your view­ing area isn’t clut­tered. It’s use of white space is also another huge ben­e­fit of using this script over the typ­i­cal Google Reader, you really feel like you’re just view­ing one post at a time instead of a screen full of text.

Because I use Google Reader every day, hav­ing an option to make this expe­ri­ence sim­pler and more visu­ally attrac­tive is def­i­nitely some­thing I’m inter­ested in. I posted a few screen­shots below to explain what it looks like, I’ve also made a cus­tom icon for my dock which works out very well. If anyone’s inter­ested I’ve posted the link to the cus­tom icon right here.