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Posted by Arif Siddiquee, Software Engineer ​

We know that many of you like to take Reader with you wherever you go, so today we are updating our mobile interface by adding a few new features along with a new streamlined look.

New mobile features include support for "liking", tagging, and sorting feeds by oldest/newest. These are all features that were previously only available on the web interface, and we’ve worked to get them into the mobile version as quickly as possible.

As far as streamlining goes, we’ve made a few improvements to give you more features with less clutter. First, we redesigned the bottom action bar to include a “More” link, revealing additional options (with the most common actions selected by default).

We’ve also updated the main header to be consistent with other Google mobile applications, specifically Gmail, Calendar, and Latitude. And we’ve added an option drop-down in place of the old secondary tool bar, to give you a little more space for your feed items. We hope this also reduces those accidental “mark as read” accidents that happen on occasion.

On Reader's web interface, we've made it easier to find people who are sharing stuff similar to you. Take a peek at the new people recommendations (in the “Recomended sources” section on the web interface) to find folks with shared items we think you’ll enjoy. It's a nifty way to discover new feeds and people that you might not have discovered otherwise.

As always, we listen to your feedback and use it to improve Reader. If there are specific features you miss on the mobile version of Google Reader, head over to our Product Ideas page and leave us a note. We love all kinds of feedback through our official help forums and our Twitter account.

Posted by Arif Siddiquee, Software Engineer

The more eagle-eyed Reader users have noticed a few tweaks being made to Reader's mobile interface over the past few days:

• We've brought over a few more features from the desktop version of Reader: magic ranking and search. Both can be found in the option drop-down menu.
• For better consistency with the desktop version, we've made the titles of items be links to the original page
• The top of each item now has "collapse" and "next item" links. This way there's always a consistent space for your thumb to hit so you can advance to the next item.

Since we know the best mobile content is short and sweet, we're going to leave you with that. Feel free to get in touch with us on Twitter or on our help group with feedback on these changes.

Posted by Arif Siddiquee, Software Engineer

As Google Reader is all about reading, we thought we should give our users a chance to maximize their screen space whenever possible... thus fullscreen mode was born. You can toggle the fullscreen mode through the 'f' key. Additionally, you can use 'shift + u' to show and hide the navigation panel so you can easily change what you're reading without leaving fullscreen mode.

Eagle-eyed viewers might have also noticed we've added a new category to the trends page: clicked trends - now you can see which sources you click on the most.
And finally, something many of you have asked for before...we now show you your lifetime read item count. That's right. Every. Single.* Item.**

*Only things you've scrolled by, or clicked on - doesn't count mark all as read.
**Okay, that's not quite accurate - once you hit around 300K (which we know some of you are already over) we stop counting for performance reasons. Consider that "beating the game".

Posted by Arif Siddiquee, Software Engineer

As some of you have noticed, we've recently enhanced Reader's commenting abilities, via an "Options" menu that is present for all conversations about shared items. You can now get a link to the equivalent conversation in Google Buzz, which is handy for passing around a funny thread. If it's your shared item, you can disable comments entirely, if for example the conversation was about a topic whose time has passed.

Additionally, you can now moderate comments within Reader. If the conversation is on an item that you shared, you have the option to remove comments directly. For all conversations, you can report comments as spam.

We hope these changes will help you keep an elevated level of discourse about shared items. As always, if you have any questions or comments about these new features, please head over to our help forums, or send us a message on Twitter.