Interesting. I've discussed that silly article last week in a mailing list. Here's the body of my post there:
I disagree. I've been using Reeder like crazy since the first beta is publicly released, and up till now my experience is: it is the best OS X app I've ever used. The UI is not flawless on a screen without touching, but it's the most efficient and elegant interface I've ever seen on a desktop app.
Complaining those little buttons are hard to reach is kinda pointless for two reasons:
1) It's secondary usage. One spends most of time in a feed reader scanning through headlines, or reading the actual content. How many times do you actually star an article? I don't believe I have a higher standards for articles, but I probably star 2~4 articles a day. Why do you want to clutter an elegant interface for such low value functionality? As for the management feature, sure you'll manage the feeds in Google Reader. Reeder is supposed to be just a, em, reader.
2) Those actions all have really really simple and easy to remember shortcuts. If you are a power user of feeds and you do a lot of unreading, starring, etc, the right way to do is to press the shortcut keys. M for marking un/read, S for starring. How hard is that?
What has Reeder got right as a feed reader, compared to, say, NetNewsWire or Google Reader? Layout and typography.
The 3-column layout is so much more efficient than the two-panel with right-panel split into headlines and body (a.k.a. Mail.app style). The left column to select categories and feed. This is the same in Reeder, NNW and GR. But the killer is the middle column.
In the headline views in both NNW and GR you get a single line to show the title and the first few words of a feed. This line is spanning too long horizontally, which makes it hard to scan through long lists of feeds due to the inability to quickly reposition visual focus back to the beginning of the next line. There is a reason why we have an “optimal line-width”.
In Reeder the middle column positions titles and the first few words vertically, which makes the line-width shorter (it has to make room for the right column anyway) and far easier to scan through. I believe this style is actually pioneered by Microsoft in Outlook. Look at any well-designed newspaper and you'll see the same design: narrow columns for quick scanning.
Plus, in NNW's Mail.app-style right column, the vertical screen asset for the actual feed content is significantly wasted when you want to read a long feed: by default more than half the vertical pixels are devoted to the headline view (although you can adjust this but then it conflicts with the headline view when scanning titles). Sure you can click and open a feed, but that extra one click kills efficiency. And because the content view is much wider, we get the same line-width issue before. Reeder's Outlook-style right column, being both taller and narrower, makes it much easier for reading feeds.
And don't even get me started on typography! In the official GR, the typography is basically a completely failure (as in nearly all Google products anyway). They don't even bother to provide a larger line-height! Reading in GR is just a painful experience.