Hi.
I love the idea of Current and at the recommendation of John Gruber I’m giving Current a try. Using Current has been a mess so far and has not been a calming experience!
I am a long-term Inoreader user with 350+ feeds, about 200 of which are active at any one time. I use Inoreader on my iPhone and Mac multiple times a day (probably way too much) to read news (The Guardian, NPR, The Atlantic, etc.), Substacks, tech sites, and sport and entertainment. Thus far, Current has been a challenge to use.
I am using iCloud syncing on an iPhone 13 mini running iOS 18.6.2 and a MacBook Pro M4 running 15.7.3.
I have imported an OPML file of all my feeds into both the iOS app and MacOS app. On my Mac, the Inoreader folders were translated into currents after several hours. On my iPhone, all I have is a river with 25 empty currents. This seems to be holding true after a day of use and multiple quiting and restarting the apps.
The Settings interface is not iOS or Mac like. For instance, some of the settings use sliding buttons. These should not be exclusive. These types of buttons when used correctly are “and’s” not “or’s”. I believe, but could be wrong, that Apple design guidelines would say these types of buttons should be radio buttons. Under Appearance, how can the content be more than 100% of the width? And Font Size as a %? Having a font at 100% means what? 100% of the System font? Other settings mentioned in the documentation, I just can’t find. Where is Mute or Archive? I don’t see them on iOS or MacOS, but maybe they’re right there.
In MacOS, it seems really weird that clicking on the River icon brings up a dialog box. Either the currents should be a scrolling list across the top or side or bottom or a pop-up menu.
In the MacOS Sift view, clicking on the “release” button (is it a button or just a text label) often does nothing until the next article is clicked on. Shouldn’t the release happen near-instantly? Also, the button/labels are way too small, at least on my MacBook Pro screen. They should be bigger, more inline with sizing in the MacOS, or user configurable.
In MacOS, when looking at Settings >> Sources >> Edit…, I can see the source URL, but I can’t edit it? That must be a bug.
The iOS interface is way too sensitive. I’ll be scrolling down the river and all of a sudden Current has saved an article or interpreted my gesture as a swipe and something else happens.
The River on my iPhone doesn’t update properly. Running side-by-side with Inoreader, I can manually initiate a feed update and I get near instantaneous (several seconds, no more than 5) updates. Current doesn’t properly update most of the time. At least today, half the time the manual update gets stuck and does nothing after several minutes. At other times, after a long, long wait, the update proceeds, but there are news articles that just don’t show up, but are available in Inoreader. Current seems to update on the set (15 minute) interval.
As other users have mentioned, having static velocities is a problem. I really like the idea of velocities, but they should all be user configurable.
I’m sure there’s a bunch more stuff, this is just what I’ve noticed over the last day and having the two apps open in front of me now.
So, all of this is to say that I really want to like Current, but I don’t see how it’s ready for 1.0. I’ll keep trying as updates get released.
Forrest