Current Is an RSS Reader With a Twist ⇥ terrygodier.com

Terry Godier introducing Current, his new RSS reader:

Each article has a velocity, a measure of how quickly it ages. Breaking news burns bright for three hours. A daily article stays relevant for eighteen. An essay lingers for three days. An evergreen tutorial might sit in your river for a week.

As items age, they dim. Eventually they’re gone, carried downstream. You don’t mark them as read. You don’t file them. They simply pass, the way water passes under a bridge.

I have been using Current for a couple of days now. I am a longtime NetNewsWire user, so I have needed to shake a little bias about how an RSS reader “should” work. And, ultimately, it is an RSS reader, so it is on some level a different presentation of familiar elements.

Sometimes, though, a modest rethinking is all that is needed for something to feel entirely different, and Current does. I quite like what Godier has come up with here. In the spirit of water metaphors, my main feed almost feels like an expansive pool of things to read, just floating there. No pressure. Some of the feeds I read are updated frequently; most less so. Godier’s design means the more rapid feeds do not overwhelm more careful personal essays. It all seems to work pretty well, I think.

A cool thing about open standards is that it means I can use Current on my phone and NetNewsWire on my Mac. Each feels right to me for its individual context. On my Mac, I might want to churn through a bunch of recent stories; on my phone, though, I might just want to find one great thing to read while I am taking a coffee break.

Current is a one-time $13 Canadian charge in the App Store, or $10 in the U.S., which feels like a throwback. Turns out it is still possible to sell apps without subscription pricing.