I switched from NetNewsWire to Google Reader a few months ago, and it’s pretty clear that I’m not going to come back this time, but there’s still one thing that doesn’t work for me: in NetNewsWire, I used to scan quickly through all the articles, while listening to podcasts or watching TV, and open in tabs those I wanted to read; then, when I had more time and was more focused, I went through the tabs one by one.

That doesn’t work in a browser, becomes it quickly becomes sluggish, and I don’t trust it to save my list of open tabs if I quit or it crashes — whereas I could restart NetNewsWire when it was getting too bloated, and it would reload the list of tabs without actually loading the pages until I wanted to look at them.

I’ve gotten to use Google Reader’s “Mark as unread” option to survive, but it doesn’t really work either: the unread counts become misleading, and sometimes marked-unread articles will disappear, then reappear, etc. — basically it’s both inconvenient and unreliable.

So here comes Reader Helper: it’s a standalone application that displays your Google Reader page along with a side window listing the links you intend to read. Click on a link and it’s added to the floating sidebar, waiting. Whenever you feel like it, you can browse through the links on your sidebar, and clicking them will open the page in your default browser.

Read links stay in the sidebar until you purge it, in case something didn’t load or you need to come back to something you read earlier. And you can also Command-click a link in Google Reader to open it immediately in your browser.

The links list is backed by an sqlite database, using Gus Mueller’s FMDB library, because I’m used to SQL and I trust it not to lose data. (Even if the app crashed in the middle of saving a database update, I think you wouldn’t lose anything but the update in progress.)

0.1 is a very primitive version that doesn’t support a lot of things that I ultimately want to (I even forgot to put a loading spinner on the browser window, don’t worry if it’s empty and white for a while when you launch it), but the point is that not having a tabs list in Google Reader was driving me insane, and I really needed this application to exist, right here, right now, so I switched away from iPhone app development for a day to code it.

Download.

Twitter.