Terry Godier, in a thoughtful essay on the design of RSS feed readers:
There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my
feed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having
done something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of
walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except
when you look around, the room is empty. There’s no one there.
There never was.I’ve been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer
than I probably should, given that it concerns something as
mundane as reading articles on the internet. But I’ve come to
believe that these small, repeated experiences shape us more than
we like to admit.So let me start with a question that’s been nagging at me: why do
RSS readers look like email clients?
There are good answers to that question, and for 20-some years I’ve used a feed reader — NetNewsWire — that looks like an email client. (To be honest, I wish my email client looked and worked more like NetNewsWire.) But the bigger question Godier is asking is why don’t more feed readers trying something different?
He’s answered his own question with Current, a new feed reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
