Current in action, reading one of my newsletters.
Every morning, I start my day with breakfast, a cup of tea, and my iPad. This is the latest version of a ritual that began years ago with an actual newspaper that an actual human being left in my driveway. For the last five years, it’s all been mediated by my RSS reader, but it’s an experience that integrates newsletters and RSS feeds together in one place.
Still, I can’t help but feel that the whole experience is not quite as good as it should be. It’s a feeling that was stoked further by Terry Godier, whose essay Phantom Obligation served as an explanation for what motivated Godier to create Current, a newsreader app that tries to escape the tyranny of unread counts and reading debt and other pressures that turn reading from a pleasure into a chore.
Godier’s approach lets you treat different media sources in different ways, which is very clever. A breaking-news firehose might fade away after a few hours; a site devoted to thoughtful longform articles a few times a week or month would have more staying power.
It all makes sense to me, which is why I was surprised that when I tried Current, I bounced right off of it. I realized that the premise of Current is that it’s providing a gentle way to fade out the noise and allow users to focus on what’s important, whether it’s based on time or voice. It’s an app that seems meant for people who check their RSS readers several times a day, perhaps on their phone whenever they’ve got downtime. Makes sense to me—but that’s not me.
