GRIPES WITH GOOGLE READER

    I have been a loyal Google Reader user for quite sometime but there have been some nagging usability issues that either I have been unable to work around or are simply not addressed by the reader.     

    One of the issues is to do with a count for the starred items. I know that I can get this information from the trends tab but would be nice to be able to see it right beside the items (as is the case for other news items and subscriptions). Also, some more freedom in terms of different ways the items can be viewed would really help. For example, I generally follow the pattern of briefly glancing through news items in the day (or week for that matter) and read them in the night (or weekends). For this, I really need to be able to sort the starred items in the reverse chronological order, else it almost seems like I am watching a news version of the movie Memento with all the events happening in reverse. I know that I could just browse all the way to the bottom and start reading in the reverse order but, am sure, any normal blog reader would
agree with me that it is painful to have to do that.  Especially given the fact that the items are fetched as you drag the scroll bar, it takes a while to get to the last item in the page.      

    Again, I am not even sure if this is a genuine usability issue or if it is a simple trick that I am missing. Either way, I guess I'll have to live with it for now (atleast until I actually push myself to file a request in the reader bugtracker or write some browser plugin to achieve this)