No pressure?

Pretty much everything I read comes via RSS so I’m quite fussy when it comes to RSS readers.

I have recently taken Terry Godier’s Current iOS app for a spin and found it, for the most part, a very nice experience.

Current is innovative in a number of different ways which you can only really appreciate by using it. An apparent innovation (mmm, not really) is that it has no inbox-style unread count. There are other RSS readers that don’t have unread counts including my favourite (still) Sublime Feed.

However, in using Current for a few days, I found it does turn out to have an unread feature, if not a count exactly. It’s subtle but it’s there and, over time, does act like an unread count.

Unread items appear bold and read items appear greyed out slightly. Initially this felt useful but as the days went on the unread items in bold started to nag at me, essentially behaving like an unread count.

A tiny thing perhaps but it was affecting my use of the app and my ability to simply read what I wanted when I wanted.

Sublime Feed on the other hand gives no indication whether an item has been read or not. I know what I have and have not read. It just presents me a river of items, and that’s it. No pressure however subtly applied.