And maybe a way to hide the side menu altogether?

Yes please!

Thank you a lot for suggesting this, and thanks to The Old Reader team for letting us know it's already planned. I think this is the feature I need the most.

I agree with this feature! It'd be awesome if you could add this on the mobile site, too.

For anyone that, like me, cant wait for them to implement this, i threw together a chrome extension that mimics this behavior.
https://github.com/Zazcallabah/oldreaderfix
Drag the crx file to chrome extension page to install.

It is just a temporary fix. It will stop working as soon as they update the website.
No guarantees. No support.

I really need it: i want to chose what to reed not having to scroll everything but only scrolling items containg unread ones

As others have already said, it's the only feature that is missing for Old Reader to be perfect.

My feeds just came through, and with thousands of items, I have no way to hide the items already read. The button to show only unread items doesn't seem to function. I hope you have this functionality before I lose Google Reader. Until then, the Old Reader will remain useless to me.

mm, This one is the one feature i missing. But it is one of the "got to have feature"

As an ex-Reader, this would be really really useful.

It's what could seperate The Old Reader from other alternatives. I get lost otherwise. ;)

Ditto what Carl said. It's actually verging on a deal breaker feature for me so I'm wondering if there's any eta on when this will be happening?

I know feature roll outs can take some time and you guys are busy but even a rough time line would really help.

For me, this is the only feature I miss from Google Reader.