RSS is the best way to keep up on the news, but man, does it feel more like an obligation than a joy.
I’ve been an avid RSS user for the past 16 years or so. As a tech news journalist, I’ve got to keep my eye out on the massive amount of news and information across many sources. RSS solves that problem, letting me create lists of outlets and news sources that I can organize into topical lists. Google Reader (launched in 2005) was my favorite platform for managing these lists, but it was shut down by the tech giant in 2013.
I’ve been searching for something better ever since. I’ve tried many RSS platforms, like NetNewsWire and Feedly, but they all end up feeling more like managing an inbox than finding out what’s happening in the tech news space. The problem is that with such massive amounts of content coming in, you end up with huge unread counts and overwhelming red notification badges. You end up clicking through stories, not even reading them sometimes, just to get rid of that annoying count.
The developer of Current, a new RSS app for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, thinks he has it solved, and after a week or so of using it, I think he might be right.
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Developer Terry Godier even has a new name for this sort of discomfort around our sense of loyalty to reading all our unreads: Phantom Obligation. “I find it useful to name these things because names give us power over them. Once you can see the phantom obligation for what it is (a mismatch between the interface’s implications and reality) its grip loosens a little,” he wrote in a blog post.
You’re not actually obligated to read things that you just asked to be notified of, he said, and once you figure that out, maybe the overwhelmed feelings will go away.
How it all works
Maybe start fresh
I downloaded Current onto my Mac Mini first, figuring I’d configure it there and then check to see how it connected with the mobile devices next. It’s a simple download from the App Store, though it will cost you $10; there’s no free trial.
Once downloaded, Current asked me to drop in some websites to add to the River, but I wanted to load my OPML feed from Feedly, so I had to go searching in the documentation on Current’s site to figure out how to import. It’s not super tricky, but it’s not immediately obvious in the interface, as Current tries to be as simple as possible. Not everyone is going to have an OPML file, anyway.
In hindsight, I do wish I’d just started fresh. There’s a lot of cruft in my RSS feeds from the last decade or so, with many of the sites I put in there a while back just not online anymore. Fortunately, there’s a quick way to delete sources that have fetch errors in Current; I actually did that on my iPhone once I installed it there.
Many devices, one River
It’s an easy download from the App store on your iPhone and iPad; if you’ve paid for the app, you’ll just see the little download icon instead of a price button. It syncs via iCloud, so once you’ve set up your account on one device and you’re logged into iCloud with the same account on every other device, all your feeds just show up. The interfaces are a bit different, with the iPad looking more like macOS than iPhone, but that’s to be expected. The best part is just, well, reading. Depending on how many feeds you have in there (I likely have too many, which is why I may start fresh at some point), you’ll have enough new content to read whenever you pull it up.
Current will then sort the articles it pulls in as either Breaking, News, Articles, Essays, or Evergreen. Each one has a different lifespan, which Godier calls “content velocity.” If you skip a day, the breaking news will disappear after 3 hours, the news after 8 hours, articles after 18 hours, essays after 3 days, and evergreen sticks around for 7 days.
There’s a Voices feature as well that I’m not sure I’m “getting,” but it’s supposedly there to help you follow individual authors. I wasn’t able to figure out how to add authors – most of the suggestions in the app seemed to be outlets. Still, it’s a nice way to sort the sites you might be most interested in, and then filter your reading even more in the Voices section with a tap on the one you want to read.
The joy of letting go
Ultimately, the best part of Current is the way I worry less about stuff building up. There are no notification badges, no stress about getting everything read down the list. If I don’t get to a News piece in a day, it goes away. Plus, i can save or “release” anything I’ve read. On the iPhone, you simply swipe left a little to mark a story as read, a little farther to release it. Marking it as read works with any other RSS feed source if you use something like Feedbin, NewsBlur, or FreshRSS to populate your RSS feed. Releasing an article just removes the articel from your view immediately. You don’t need to do either, as Current will naturally remove content from your feed over time, but you can use these to have a little more direct control.
The reading experience
Design is life
Perhaps my favorite thing about Current is the visual design. You can set Current to one of nine well-crafted color palettes, each with its own light and dark variant. They’re all themed, so the background and surface colors, text hierarchy, accent colors, and semantic colors all match the theme. You can choose Bright, Paper, Ocean, Dusk, Ember, Midnight, Slate, Terminal, and Solarized. I’ve pretty much stuck on Paper, as it feels calmer and more like an eReader than any of the other themes, but they’re all lovely.
When scrolling through your feeds, there’s what Godier calls the Waterline. This is a subtle, blue-tinted horizontal line that shows you fresh content above it and content you’ve already scrolled past below it. It’s a nice, easy visual way to figure out where you’re at in your own personal reader timeline.
Even better, Godier has implemented a feature called Ambient Closure. It’s a way to replace “numbers with feelings.” When you’ve scrolled through most of the fresh content, the interface will “relax,” with a more spacious feeling in the scroll area, and the overall visual rhythm slows down. There are gentle messages like “The current is quiet” or “Nothing demands your attention.” Great little reminders to chill out.
Currently reading
Current may not be for you if you love numbers, badges, notifications, or checking off your to-do list. For the rest of us, who just want to see what’s new in our chosen content world, Current may be the answer. It feelsl ike a living, breathing content stream where the focus is reading, not achieving. Give Current a try today and see if it helps you find a new peace.
