Terry Godier

I've been prototyping a fun little GUI over the top of Finder

Thu, 07 May 2026 17:38:33 -0500

Jokingly calling it Finder++. Here are a couple of videos from the past few days of playing around.

You can use cmd+shift+. to summon the shelf from the bottom of the screen at any time.

It’s a pure canvas with a visual representation of the files. Move them anywhere, rotate them, make some larger, some smaller.

Draw relationships between items, visually, and navigate through those.

Not sure what this becomes, if anything, but it’s been a lot of fun. I’m a visual thinker and I love files over anything else. Let me know if you have any use cases you can see this for, or what you might want to do with it!

Oh, and this is 100% swiftui - no funny business.

Wed, 06 May 2026 16:08:22 -0500

Listen, friends. I love Linux, but I can’t, in good faith, deliver software with the level of information density you seem to require. But I love you anyway <3

Wed, 06 May 2026 13:30:11 -0500

What I want to build are things that work the old fashioned way, on protocols that give users sovereignty and agency, but with modern thinking applied to the UI and UX.

That’s it. That’s my whole shtick. Thanks!

Tue, 05 May 2026 20:48:34 -0500

All I want in life is a modern version of Yojimbo that re-imagines Finder as a surface to drag and drop and save and recall and organize various things.

Text snippets, memes, contacts, dmgs, webpage archives, bookmarks, json files, whatever.

Persistent, visual, spatial, wonderful. Too much?

Current v1.0.14 is rolling out now.

Tue, 05 May 2026 17:21:39 -0500

After 9 days (yes!) in review…

You can now save articles on macOS via the plus button on the saved view, or by pasting a url into the command palette (cmd+k)
You can now right click any source or current in sidebar on macOS and release all, or release all read.
Added changelog rss feed quick add under help (so you can keep up to date with what’s changing inside Current)
Fixed an issue where Inoreader users would get duplicated currents created from folders.
Fixed an issue where Currents may un-delete themselves from sync provider.
Added a feature to re-build currents from sync provider tags/folders at any time.
Fixed an issue where after editing a source the list would jump to the top on macOS.
Fixed an issue where feedbin may give us urls with hashes that don’t map to feed locations (for newsletters for example).
You can now set a default browser to open in on macOS (not just safari anymore)
Made logged in sessions persist more reliably.
KaTeX and MathJax are now supported for all the math.
Many other small tweaks and bug fixes.

apps.apple.com/us/app/cu…

Tue, 05 May 2026 16:20:18 -0500

Exceptional thinking, once again courtesy of Gruber.

daringfireball.net/2026/05/s…

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:18:16 -0500

Hell yeah. Same.

shkspr.mobi/blog/2026…

Tue, 05 May 2026 10:00:15 -0500

📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet

The internet you grew up on isn’t dying.

A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.

www.terrygodier.com/the-borin…

My plan with RSS

Mon, 04 May 2026 08:22:38 -0500

With Current, Sourcefeed, and Byline all in the world now, the thesis is probably close to being clear.

I fundamentally believe that people want to make things and people want to engage with things made by other people.
We’ve got robots now that are close to, if not already, making most of the things published online. This will only grow.

These two things are in conflict.

I see RSS as a protocol that offers very little incentive for a robot or a person with a robot to operate on. The reason for that is both cultural and structural:

No algorithmic amplification
No discovery surface
No sales funnels, behavior metrics, or things to optimize

It’s not a rich format, it’s not a billion dollar growth platform. It’s boring and it’s old and it’s wonderful.

Here is what I’ve done.

Current is my take on an RSS reader client. Modern, and with enhanced user agency. You get to control how much of each thing comes in and how long it lasts - crucial functionality I felt was missing. It’s also an easy place for me to push out experimental functionality that furthers this mission (more on that in a minute).

Sourcefeed is my take on RSS as a first-class-citizen. Instead of RSS being a byproduct of making a Wordpress blog, now it’s the whole thing. Sourcefeed launched about a week ago and it’s growing significantly every day. The sincerity of the writing there is emotional and inspiring. There are thousands of posts being created every day, a couple hundred public, the rest private. People are using it in ways I hadn’t thought of.

Byline is my take on extending RSS (and Atom/JSON Feed) in a way that helps provide more context about who writes a thing, and what that thing might be. I’ve been working with a handful of other folks to review and improve the spec, and soon it’ll make its way to Sourcefeed for creation and Current for consumption (in the voices view, of course). A handful of folks who had already stumbled across this implemented it already (hi Stuart!).

So, to recap: a client for people to use, a first-class publishing/distribution platform for people to engage with, and an extension spec to showcase the person behind the thing.

If you believe in this as I do, please, come hang out. Pop something up on Sourcefeed, sub to some tags, or think about implementing Byline (or contributing to the spec!), or keep an eye on Current for the Byline implementation coming soon. Or don’t - that’s what is amazing about RSS. You can bring your own tools and beliefs!

Introducing Tags for Sourcefeed

Sat, 02 May 2026 11:59:38 -0500

Tags are now a thing on Sourcefeed. When you write a post, you can pick one (optional). The post still goes to your subscribers the way it always has. It also shows up in a shared feed with everyone else who tagged the same thing.

The tags:

walk: a note from a walk

noticed: a small thing you saw today

daily: a short daily log

weekly: a reflection on the past week

prompt: a question for other feeds to reply to

sourcefeed: comments and ideas about the platform

Each has its own RSS feed. Visit discover or https://www.sourcefeed.app/tag/walk to see what one looks like. Copy the rss url at the top, drop it into your reader, you’ll get walks from every public Sourcefeed user.

I went with a small closed set instead of free-form hashtags. Open tags get gamed for visibility and a curated handful is more interesting anyway. These six are the ones I think actually prompt a behavior worth doing.

The picker sits at the bottom of the post editor.

Sat, 02 May 2026 10:59:57 -0500

Really interesting to see how sourcefeed is working in several ways. It’s a quasi social network for some, responding to each other and coordinating topics, a niche stream of links, daily journals, and software changelogs. Inspiring!

Two new features for Sourcefeed

Fri, 01 May 2026 11:28:34 -0500

Private subscribers

You can now create private feed urls for readers. Perhaps you have a membership program that offers full-text posts, or you want to kick off a feed to share just with a few personal friends. Easy peasy. Everyone gets their own distinct feed url and you can revoke access at any time.

Post Footers

Under edit (on each feed) you can enter some details that will show up at the bottom of every post. This is a good spot to put your name and a way to contact you for replies, if you wish.

Fri, 01 May 2026 08:36:54 -0500

Several people write posts on Sourcefeed saying “I have no idea if anyone reads this” - which I consider to be a feature not a bug.

I can happily report though, that every public feed has at least 75 subscribers. So, for now, yes, someone is probably reading that :)

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:08:20 -0500

If they launched full-time goblin mode, I’d use it

openai.com/index/whe…

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:54:00 -0500

AI bots are now blocked on Sourcefeed. Being RSS-only there’s not really much to scrape, so the surface area is small, but now they’re explicitly blocked from the feeds. If they ignore robots.txt there’s still a proxy/middleware that will blackhole them.

www.sourcefeed.app/robots.tx…

Gratitude, honor, and anger

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:48:56 -0500

I spent last night subscribing to all of the public feeds on Sourcefeed. A few folks even sent me their private feeds (thank you!)

I got emotional reading those posts. There’s a lot of earnest writing in there, a lot of living happening in those words. People choosing to log their day, share their music preferences, write about various news beats, post frog pictures, all sorts of things.

Sitting with it, there are two primary feelings. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and honor — that people trust the little utility I built enough to be sincere about using it, that I’m trusted with hanging onto their words and delivering them to whomever they intend to read them.

Writing this, I feel something else. I’m angry at the extractive bastards who own a platform and then treat the people who write there like shit. Taking their words as collateral to run ads against. Deciding whether anyone sees what they wrote based on whether it’ll keep someone else scrolling. Manufacturing the anxious return to doomscroll more.

Enough. We’ve all had enough of that. I hope a thousand other sites pop up where the deal is just the deal: words written by people, delivered to whomever they intend to read them. Where creation isn’t a means to anything else. It is the thing.

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:35:46 -0500

Ok, this has been unbelievably fun to see what everyone is writing about (publicly) and the crazy, zany ideas you have for the api!

🙏🙏🙏

www.sourcefeed.app/discover

Today I'm launching Sourcefeed - a pop-up RSS service

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:45:33 -0500

Why?

Some writing wants to be a website. Some wants to be a newsletter. Some wants to be a feed.

Sourcefeed is for the third kind. RSS-only. No website, no inbox, no algorithm. Subscribers read it where they choose, in whatever reader they already trust.

The model is Craig Mod’s pop-up newsletter. Finite, intentional, with a clear end. I borrowed the shape and pointed it at RSS, the original open standard, still the calmest place on the internet to publish.

While testing this, a few friends and I made personal feeds. One of us logged movies. Another logged albums. We subscribed to each other in our readers and posted whenever we felt like it. It was different from a group chat. Slower. The slowest social media ever made, and the calmest.

I’ll use one of mine for a changelog. Current, my RSS app, has a feed about what’s shipping and why.

I’m extremely curious what other people will invent.

A few starts:

A 30-day no-algorithm challenge. Daily posts for a month, no metrics, no platform watching, just a small obligation.

The Rolling Stone top 500 albums in a year. A short essay per album. Five hundred posts. A personal canon.

A family travel log sent to relatives in their RSS readers instead of group texts.

Make small finite things. Try one. The format is forgiving. You might even find that you write more.

Every feed comes with an (optional) landing page - complete with a dynamic, branded open-graph image for social sharing.

No ads, no tracking, no funny business. Stop paying when you’re done. Export your content (a zip of markdown files, one per post) at any time.

If you want to keep up to date on how Sourcefeed evolves, there’s (of course) a feed for that.

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:21:52 -0500

This is a really thoughtful response by Max Obermeier to my “the last quiet thing” essay:

maxobermeier.eu/Owning%20…

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:35:05 -0500

Somehow just catching this, but Stuart Breckenridge recently launched Gobbler, a no-nonsense rss aggregator. Looks extremely solid to me, and look at that: it works with Current (through the google reader compatible api).

Nicely done, Stuart!

#rss

A Tale of Two App Stores

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:34:24 -0500

Apple actually runs two app stores for each platform: a paid one and a free one.

Here’s a story that’s closer to reality than it should be:

You and a friend are building apps. You’ve got the same concept, but disagree on pricing. You want to do an upfront paid app and he wants to do a subscription based app.

You both put in a few months of work and have a v1 concept that feels shippable. Good vibes.

You launch the app. You set a price of $4.99. One-time. Your friend goes with a 7-day trial and $4.99 per year going forward.

Paid apps get no trial period. There’s simply not a way to do it. But in the free store? Your friend has options. He could put a hard paywall in his app, effectively making it paid-only (many do), a soft paywall, an introductory offer, a promotional offer — all sorts of things.

Assuming you’ve built enough of a benefit story for users to buy your app, now it’s time to get paid, and to pay Apple. Subscription apps get an automatic discount on Apple fees for year two+ of the term, dropping from 30% to 15%. One-time purchase apps are only able to get a 15% rate by being part of the Small Business Program, which is a program developers must apply for, and wait for approval by Apple, to enter.

Since you’re a new developer, you applied for the small business program in the same month that you created your developer account and launched your app. Once approved (it takes a little bit) it’ll take effect the following month. Month 1 sales will still be billed at the 30% take rate.

A few months go by and things are going well. You’ve got lots of new features suggested by users and now that you have proven your concept you can invest in some roadmap work.

Apple offers you no mechanism for what is arguably the most natural transaction in software: paying for major upgrades. The only option is to create a new app listing or to use an IAP. There’s a strong disadvantage to creating a new app listing, namely losing your accumulated reviews and visibility. Your buddy creates a monthly plan to go alongside the yearly option. He considers a lifetime purchase as well.

You get your first sales report and notice a handful of refunds. You mention it to your friend and he says oh yeah, don’t you get the notifications? No, you don’t. Well, why are they refunding? You don’t know. Apple does ask users during the Report a Problem process, but they don’t pass that along. His customer requests a refund and he gets a push from Apple within minutes, with the reason attached. He has 12 hours to respond. He submits usage data. He tells Apple whether he thinks the refund should be granted. He finds out the outcome. He has built an entire customer support flow on the back of this API within his app. Your customer requests a refund from a webpage he had to Google and you find a line item in next month’s financial report.

Every missing feature for paid apps has a working equivalent in the IAP world.

Maybe Apple just hasn’t gotten to these features yet, but from where I sit this looks less like a backlog and more like a strategy. Don’t let the word “free” confuse you, there’s still plenty of business to do with a free app. Free means free to download, not free to use, and that’s by design.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:18:07 -0500

A favor: please send me all of your favorite internet radio stations. Especially those run by one person. Send me any ambient streams of the real world you know of: coffee shops, street corners, gardens, whatever. Thank you!

App Store Reviews are Busted

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:37:31 -0500

Reviews on the App Store have bothered me for a long time. Review systems in general, really.

People leave reviews to give feedback to developers, and to help other users know what to expect. Sometimes they’re used punitively, as an outlet for frustration, or as a support channel.

But sometimes they’re impactful in a way that doesn’t match the reviewers intent. For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review.

In what world is a 4 star review a bad review? A 1, 2 star review - those are negative reviews with congruent intent. A 3 star review is probably neutral (at least logically on a 1-5 scale).

You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and are being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though the intent was clearly not to do so.

There’s also a fundamental mismatch in the way they’re used by the platforms (i.e. Apple). Reviews, both velocity and aggregate score, are used in ranking and discovery algorithms. A 4 star review with a glowing snippet of text SHOULD be used to aid in discovery in a positive way, right?

What app developers have evolved to do about this is to time the review ask to just the right moment, where you’ve done something awesome in the app and we have a pretty good confidence level that you’re going to give a good review.

Many take it one step further and that is to show a custom review prompt that any rating selected other than 5 stars redirects you to fill in a feedback form, thus trying to gate the reviews that are transmitted to Apple at all.

With all of this in mind, is the system working as intended? I think not.

The logical endpoint of apps optimizing for a 5 star review invalidates the system as meaningful on the store. The system becomes a better representation of the sophistication at review prompt execution than it does an accurate reflection of app product quality. The incentive isn’t to create an actual 5 star app, but rather to create a robust system that transmits only 5 star reviews.

I refuse to do prompts for review of any sort. My app is a paid upfront app with a calm philosophy and my personal philosophy is that I’ve already been paid as part of the transaction. I don’t feel good about asking people to do something else for me. Many choose to do it on their own, which is great, and appreciated, but I leave that choice to them.

As my good friend Jon Henshaw (mastodon / website) told me today:

“I am my biggest impediment and I’m okay with that. I sleep great.”

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:35:54 -0500

So this ad is just downright trickery right?

The CTA directly beneath the show I looked up says watch now. It’s styled like a button, even animated, and yet it’s no button. How can this possibly convert meaningful enough to be worth it?

Current v1.0.13 is out now for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:22:40 -0500

This release includes some really nice quality of life features to help your river become even more calm.

You can now set a custom velocity / age out date for a source!
You can now configure the app to use the “since it first appeared in the river” date as the age out start so that you don’t miss content if you have long periods of away time (good for you!)
Sped up reader extraction.
Sped up fetching for iCloud only accounts.
Fixed a bug where on cold launch the loader may get stuck.
Fixed a bug where iCloud sync can overwrite current membership and appear as though pausing is broken.
Improvements to the river position on iOS when new content arrives.
Youtube rss should no longer discover random channels.
Keyboard focus on macOS should be restored much more reliably for shortcuts access.
Command + Z to undo release is now available on macOS.