Google launched currents, for US region only. Thank you to google search, it helped me to find an off-line installable copy of currents to download & install it outside US. On downloading, the 1st time setup has been quiet smooth to get few default Libraries & trends. This helped me in understanding the potentials of this application.
Library: The moment I added my Google Reader feeds into library, it was a Bonanza. Now, I read all my feeds from currents [Bye bye google reader]. Offline sync of the contents with configuration of accessing only over WiFi / 3G is beauty. It saves me on my 2G data-plan bill. What i miss is some indication of new un-read notifications within the Library. Even it misses showing visual distinguish between read & un-read articles.
Trends: I can add categories of trends I'm interested. It ranges from news to science, technology to sports. Once selected, I get good feed of what's trending now. On each topic selection, I'm happy to read the story headline from major vendors. It's impressive to see 3 sections of each story - Stories, User Generated & About; giving 360 degree perspective on the information.
Trends mark read articles with grey titles vs black bold titles for un-read. One minor usability bug is when a detail news is read & returned back to trend page, it scrolls back to the top [instead of where I browsed into].
Today, I thought of exploring how to create a publication & created my edition. Following through the template flow of linking an RSS / embedding a google doc, I could create my first edition within few minutes. I could also test it live on my android device by loading content from Google servers within minutes. This has been really impressive. I'm loving it.
In summary, though there are few bugs & improvements required - I'm hooked onto this client. I'll look forward for this client to be available outside US.
Library: The moment I added my Google Reader feeds into library, it was a Bonanza. Now, I read all my feeds from currents [Bye bye google reader]. Offline sync of the contents with configuration of accessing only over WiFi / 3G is beauty. It saves me on my 2G data-plan bill. What i miss is some indication of new un-read notifications within the Library. Even it misses showing visual distinguish between read & un-read articles.
Trends: I can add categories of trends I'm interested. It ranges from news to science, technology to sports. Once selected, I get good feed of what's trending now. On each topic selection, I'm happy to read the story headline from major vendors. It's impressive to see 3 sections of each story - Stories, User Generated & About; giving 360 degree perspective on the information.
- Stories are more of content publication agencies,
- User generated content is scrawled mostly on videos generated by users, and
- About links more to generic information sites like Wikipedia & similar.
Trends mark read articles with grey titles vs black bold titles for un-read. One minor usability bug is when a detail news is read & returned back to trend page, it scrolls back to the top [instead of where I browsed into].
Today, I thought of exploring how to create a publication & created my edition. Following through the template flow of linking an RSS / embedding a google doc, I could create my first edition within few minutes. I could also test it live on my android device by loading content from Google servers within minutes. This has been really impressive. I'm loving it.
In summary, though there are few bugs & improvements required - I'm hooked onto this client. I'll look forward for this client to be available outside US.
