I'm only just coming up to speed on Reeder too, but the program seems elegantly designed and is super fast. However, it's also currently tied pretty closely to Google Reader (as you'll see) so switching means that we're taking a leap and assuming that the developer is going to somehow break away from the Google API so that when things shut down in July we're not all left in the dark. Still, that's a pretty good bet and it really is a nicely designed application, so...

To get started, pop into the App Store and buy, then download a copy of the application. It's a quick download, even if you're tapped into a public wifi connection, and then double click to launch it.

Here's what you'll see:

As I said, there's not really yet a "don't use Google Reader" option. In fact, click on "Create an Account..." and you'll be taken to Google Reader, not to an account management area on the Reeder web site. Oops.

Enter your account and password to connect the app with your Reader account and if you aren't using 2-step verification (and you should be! learn more: How to enable 2-step verification for your Google account) you'll log in. If you are using it for better account security, however, you'll see this:

No worries. You need to use what's called an application-specific password. Go to the Google 2-step page and scroll down to find the section ingeniously called "Application-specific passwords":

(Note, I've tweaked the above image slightly to ensure you can read the text. Your layout will be slightly different)

Click on "Manage application-specific passwords" and scroll down past the list to find this box:

That's the key! I used "Mac Reeder App" but you can specify whatever you want. Click on "Generate password" and it shows you a 16-char temporary password for Reeder:

Copy it from this page, go back to Reeder, and enter that as your password. That's easy enough and it should be a one-time task, by the way.

Now Reeder can start pulling in your RSS data from Google Reader. Finally. It starts out rather empty:

After a minute or two, however, the data starts populating and you realize that Reeder has a pretty darn nice interface. Leftmost column is subscriptions, middle column is new articles for the selected site or list (I've clicked on "Unread" to read them all by date) and the right section shows the actual article:

To zip through your subscription updates, simply move your cursor to the bottom of the right pane, where there's a black arrow pointing down. Now each time you click on it, you'll move to the next new article:

Even better, there are some super useful keyboard shortcuts. Check out Preferences for a full list but here are a few to get you going:

I find that making the Reeder window really big and leaving my finger on the 'j' key lets me really zip through my articles, even faster than how I kept up with everything while in Google Reader. Nice!

Explore the preferences while you're getting started, there are lots of useful tweaks you can make to the app.

And in terms of when Reeder will divorce itself from Google Reader? Well, we can all stay tuned for that update...