Found Footage: Pulse News Reader for iPad
I've been looking for an iPad RSS news reader for a while, and was totally underwhelmed by what was out there. Fortunately, a reader pointed me to a video demonstrating Pulse News Reader (US$3.99), a new RSS reader from a couple of Stanford grad students.
Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari have created an RSS reader that makes traditional readers look like, well, cluttered inboxes. If you're one of those folks who follows a few hundred RSS feeds, you may not like Pulse -- the current version has a limit of 20 feeds. The app makes it drop-dead simple to add feeds by searching keywords, and then picking feeds from the search results. The feeds show up as a series of tabbed rows of articles with the newest posts on the far left, oldest on the far right. Navigating posts is done by flicking left or right, and you can read the full post by tapping on the large post icon.
Pulse 1.1 still needs some work -- the current version doesn't support video, so the post icon for this article would appear as text only. Still, it looks great and is easily one of the most usable news readers I've seen. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that TUAW is one of their featured sources in the app...
We'll have a more thorough TUAW review of Pulse News Reader soon. Thanks to Graham for the tip!
[via Cult of Mac]
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I've been looking for an iPad RSS news reader for a while, and was totally underwhelmed by what was out there. Fortunately, a reader...
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it's also missing offline support
June 02 2010 at 3:48 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI want an iPad. :(
June 01 2010 at 6:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAgreed. I've used this app daily for the past couple weeks in conjunction with Early Edition, but Google Reader (on my work pc) is used for the bulk of my rss reading. While the app is impressive in several areas, this new trend in 2d interactive media consumption is flawed on the human factors front. It might work okay for instance with NPR with only three rows that are static vertically, but this one with more than a handful of feeds is just too much effort once you get past the novelty of it all. And why put it out there as "research project by two Stanford grad students"? A bit obnoxious.
Early Edition is interesting and shows to me there's a reason why newspapers are the way they are, but it misses in the most crucial way - there is no weighting to the articles - just timestamp - and the pages are statically defined. So important articles may be relagated to blurbs, and vise-versa.
i'll hold out for the Reeder version for the iPad.
June 01 2010 at 1:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe iPad version of reeder looks awesome. The iPhone version is so insanely well put together that I'd be shocked if the iPad version wasn't at least equally great.
Pulse looks interesting, but it's not really a feed reader in the typical sense, since it only supports twenty sources (this seems to be a major limitation in my eyes).
You can play video in it such as clips from digg.com but it seems to require a two finger touch to start playing.
June 01 2010 at 1:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplySpeaking of RSS feeds. The majority of your articles fail to inform your RSS feed readers that there is more content available beyond the scope of the feed itself.
June 01 2010 at 1:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIMO the google web reader is still the fastest and most useful.
June 01 2010 at 12:54 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIt's nice, but there's no way to see what's read and unread, mark all as read, save articles for later reading, etc. etc. -- features you'd find in every desktop rss reader.
June 01 2010 at 12:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHi -
I'm responding with the pulse app right now...the unread items have a bold white white title. The read items have a gray title.
I am loving the pulse app. I too was loading multiple pages into safari, and this makes everything so much easier. I hope that they add moor than 20 feeds and the ability to create folders for different topics.
The safari on my iPad constantly has several pages of news sites open at anyone time but I saw Pulse reviewed elsewhere and bought it a coupke of days ago.
It's a much better solution than what I was doing, and great looking too.
I'm posting this from it right now :-)
FWIW - The Early Edition just updated last night. Nice updates.. makes all your feeds look like a printed newspaper.. hadn't used it much because it was lacking google integration.. until last night ;)
Pulse is slick.. very slick, but 20 feeds is a show stopper.. nice "ipad demo" app though.. but BBC reader uses the same mechanics.
looking forward to the next update.
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TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple.
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