Google Currents
As many of you mat be aware, Google recently announced their new reading app, Currents, for tablet and smartphones. It seems to be a bit like Flipboard, or other apps that make a nice, magazine-style layout for reading your favorite online content.
Being the curious techie that I am, I wanted to both check it out, and see how I could work with my own sites to “produce” editions for Google Currents. If you’re interested in adding this site to Currents, I think you can at this link.
The reason that I say that I think you can add it there, is that my attempts at actually using Currents on my iPhone were largely unsuccessful. I haven’t seen any official statement from Google that an iPhone 4 is required. (The system requirements mention needing at least iOS4, and my iPhone 3GS has the latest OS, just not the latest hardware.) However, I’ve seen some unofficial reviews mention it not working on a 3GS, and it most assuredly did not work on mine. It runs, and I can get into the program and add editions to my library, however when I go back to the home screen to read them, the library is still empty, asking me to add items.
So, if you have an Android device, newer iPhone or iPad, have you used Currents yet? What do you think of it? Are you able to add the edition at the link I gave earlier? I’d love to know if it actually works. 😉
Update: As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.
Well Mike, you’re my first site on currents (sorry George) and it works ok on my droid. The only problem is it’s yet more data being downloaded and stored on the cell which already has enough problems with running out of memory now. I’ll be trying the FIT site shortly.
If I recall correctly, you could set Currents to only sync by wifi or only sync manually, which would limit the amount of bandwidth, but not so much the amount of storage being used on the phone. That being said, I’ll probably continue to simply use the mobile interface for Google Reader and skip the pretty interfaces on my phone.
Just letting all currents producers know about http://www.currentsdirectory.com – it’s hard to get people to find your currents when you first start out so I created this site. Let me know what you think.