# [Current](https://www.terrygodier.com/current) - An RSS River by Terry Godier > I started building Current before I had the words for why. > > The impulse was simpler than a philosophy: every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn't. That reading the internet was a task. That articles were items to be processed. That falling behind was a failure state. I admit that I literally treat my RSS reader of choice—NetNewsWire—as a task list. I let the badge sit there on my home screen, pestering me with its shameful hue. Beneath lie articles I want to read or share here on the blog. I've let things sit for months before I finally have had enough of the guilt and confess to myself that I will never get around to that essay or that article or that story. When I read Tyler Godier's essay about his new RSS reader Current, it resonated. > "The main screen is a river. Not a river that moves on its own. You're not watching content drift past like a screensaver. It's a river in the sense that matters: content arrives, lingers for a time, and then fades away." I've bought Current and replaced NetNewsWire on my home screen to give it the proper test. There is *relief*. > This is the feature I'm most proud of, and the one I spent the longest agonizing over. > > Most RSS readers present sources as feed URLs in a sidebar. _Daring Fireball. kottke.org. Hacker News._ Just names in a list, undifferentiated from each other and from the content they produce. > > But some of those aren't publications. They're people. A person writing from their blog is fundamentally different from a news organization publishing articles. The relationship is different. The expectation is different. The feeling should be different. I find it rare to read about such thoughtful application design these days. Now in the midst of a proverbial tsunami of vibe coded, personal apps (which I am doing myself to great effect), Godier's essay sings with intention. There is some finickiness, like having to toggle off fetch feed to enable fetching from the site or the mystery of summoning the feed settings on iOS (is it a long press? A double tap? I'm not quite sure.), iCloud syncing isn't working for me, and the macOS app has ye old harsh, hard corners, but all of that really doesn't bother me when it comes to the reading experience. It's pure and simple. I can just scroll past the news articles from VGC that I don't care about. Those I do want to read, the fetch from site means I don't have to leave the app. That is seriously slick. Every bit of presentation and core functionality is thought out. I am checking my RSS reader less and more intentionally. I'm actually reading the stuff I want to and "releasing" those I don't. If I leave an article and it goes away over time, I don't mind. If it is important, it will come back to me. Give the essay a read and if it speaks to you like it did to me, then I think Current will be worth your $10.