Pulse News Reader iPad App
Updated March 23, 2011 – Ever since I bought the Pulse News Reader app when it originally launched May of 2010 – I’ve been such a fan of the app that I honestly didn’t even notice that Pulse News Reader is now free. As a ‘fancy RSS’ reader, I was already a huge proponent of the app, preaching the greatness of Pulse to everyone I knew. Now that Pulse has dropped the price tag and doing so without jamming the app with ads, Pulse is an requirement for every iPad owner to download.
Pulse allows you to aggregate and customize your feeds and news sources into an interactive reader composed of primarily thumbnails and snippets. By scrolling through excerpts, tap into articles and read the original piece from the website or view the text only version with all website formatting stripped away (preferable option).
Honestly, Pulse is the first app I load up every morning and before I sleep every night. It’s the perfect reading compliment to the iPad.
While browsing Techcrunch yesterday afternoon, I came across an article covering Stanford’s Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta’s Pulse News Reader iPad App. From just looking at the screen shots, I was instantly sold on Pulse’s organization and display of typically plain RSS feed articles. The App is simply beautiful to look at, intuitive to use, and displays RSS feeds in a graphical way that I thought wasn’t possible.
Even though our focus at FreeiPadApps.net is to review Free Apps, I was so impressed with the Pulse News Reader – especially at an affordable $3.99 – that I felt compelled to write our first Paid App review.
Pulse News Reader can list up to 20 RSS Feeds in the app’s interactive visual dashboard. You add feeds by either inputting the actual feed address, select from a list of popular feeds (CNN, Engadget, MTV News, etc…), or directly import from your Google Reader subscriptions.
The dashboard itself lists each one of your feeds in dedicated rows where thumbnails/images are dynamically pulled from each article. The result is a simple side scrolling menu of articles you can easily scroll through as you would with some of the other premium media apps. From the dashboard, clicking an article immediately takes you to a text excerpt of the RSS. From the view article screen, you can either read the article in text mode or web mode. Web mode opens the an in-app browser page of the article in it’s original form of the website. Integration of the actual pages is done seamlessly and loads with ease.
While there are few flaws with Pulse News Reader, there are a few things I’ve noticed while using the app. Because of the use of images, the initial dashboard does take about 5-10+ seconds to load your depending on the number of feeds you’re subscribing to. Also, in this early version of Pulse News Reader, embedded videos are not yet available. The Pulse developers have promised to bring embedded video as soon as possible (as it’s already available in free RSS reader apps like Feeddler).
Altogether, I am extremely impressed at Pulse News Reader as the app has brought a new friendy and more graphical medium for me to keep up with my RSS feeds. Pulse News Reader is one of the best of many RSS Feed Readers available in the App Store and caters to both advanced and simple users alike. (Download Pulse News Reader from iTunes App Store).
