App Review: Current
Date:
[]
Categories:
[Tech]
Tags:
[Software],
[Reviews],
[RSS]
I liked Terry Godier’s excellent article, The Boring Internet. In it he mentions Current, an RSS reader he has released that uses a different model from the “unread email” interface of NetNewsWire and many other readers. Terry explains his philosophy for Current in more detail in Phantom Obligation. He quotes Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire:
“But every new RSS reader ought to consider not being yet another three-paned-aggregator. There are surely millions of users who might prefer a river of news or other paradigms. Why not have some fun and do something new, or at least different?”
Current implements this River metaphor. The app promises “calm, minimal news reading”, and I think it achieves this goal. It's a beautiful app, enjoyable to use, and to me is well worth the $9.99 price. I like the reader's article formatting, the large, readable fonts and the calm themes and colors.
Current combines all the sources you follow into a single timeline called the River. Articles disappear from the River based on the lifespan you set for the source. News articles might remain for a few hours, essays for a week, blog posts might remain indefinitely. You adjust the lifespans to your taste to manage the River. The default categories “Breaking” (3 hours) and “News” (8 hours) work well for short-term material like news, “Essay” (3 days) or “Evergreen” (no deletion) work well for blog posts.
There are two other built-in timelines: Voices and Saved. You use Voices to follow individual writers and their blogs or newsletters. Everything in Voices also appears in the River, but Voices lets you track writers separately from news or other aggregate sources. Saved is what it sounds like, a timeline to store saved articles.
You can create additional timelines, called “currents”, to filter the main River. The documentation suggests filtering by reading context, like Morning or Weekend. So far I find the feature more useful for filtering sources into categories like News or Science.
You Release an article to manually delete it from the timeline. This works best for me with blog posts. I have news articles set to delete after either 3 or 8 hours, so I don’t bother to release them unless I really don’t want to see something. I leave everything in Voices at the “Evergreen” setting so that posts are never deleted, and release them when I’m ready.
Current syncs feeds and settings between the desktop and mobile app through iCloud. It can also use third-party services like Feedbin. A third-party service might provide more reliable syncing, but iCloud works well enough for me since I do most of my reading on an iPad and don’t depend much on syncing between devices.
Screenshots of the River and Voices screens:
