App Review: Current

I talked about Terry Godier’s essay on RSS on Episode 156 of Hemispheric Views.

I was blown away when shortly after, Terry reached out to myself, Martin and Jason. Turns out Terry is a listener of our show! He was honoured, we were honoured, it was a lovely moment in email!

In rapid time Terry has since developed an RSS reader app, Current. He allowed me to participate in the beta even though my feedback was mainly limited to spotting typos in copy text. Sorry Terry! I tried - I really tried - to give better feedback. I’m a bad tester!

The rapid development cycle Terry achieved has paid off as he has now released 1.0 of Current on the App Store. It’s not a subscription! Yay! It’s an AU$9.99 one-time buy.

The unique aspect of Current is that it embraces the concept of “The River of News” that was oft-spoken of back in the early days of RSS. His take on this is to allow the user to identify what type of feed the content is. Is it an article, news, or perhaps evergreen content? Your choice affects the length of time that article remains in your “river” before it ages out and drifts away, not to be seen again. The rationale is that this eliminates the obligation to reach inbox zero with your RSS queue. Rather, you dip in as you feel. If you don’t do it often, the time-sensitive stuff drifts awa but the evergreen contents stays waiting for you.

It’s a different take on things for sure. I’m still coming to grips with it. After all, I’ve been an inbox zero RSS reader since before Google Reader. I was a Bloglines user! So not worrying about getting to “all articles read” is a tough habit to break. Although this app is the most unique and potentially impactful RSS reader I’ve seen in a long time. The simple fact that It’s not leveraging an email client, three-pane metaphor is alone worth celebrating.

The app can sync with iCloud or you can do what I did and allow it to sync with a server of your choice. I’ve got the app connected to my FreshRSS instance, but all the usual RSS server suspects are supported.

I’m having fun trying this new take on RSS.

I congratulate Terry on re-imagining what a newsreader can be. Even more fun is that he is still actively developing the app. New and better features are landing quickly. The latest being an easier way to set what type of content each feed is. I’m excited to keep using the app, and to see where Terry takes it.

Get on board!