Pulse News Reader
by Jonathan Lonczak
Jan 27, 2011 1:19 PM –
Install
Pulse News Reader. A beautiful application that makes browsing news from websites and social networks fun and engaging. Pulse takes your favorite websites (including Facebook) and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Tap on an article, and you will see a clean and elegant view of the story. Sharing a story via Facebook, Twitter or email is as easy as two taps. Pulse has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Techcrunch and more. Experience Pulse today – you will never look at news the same way again.
Price: Free
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Displays all of your news feeds in a “colorful mosaic” style akin to that of a magazine!
- Comes with prepackaged news feeds and predefined news sources making it easy to find the news you want!
- Extremely feature rich and easy to use!
- Allows you to have multiple pages of content!
- Integrates with Facebook and Twitter!
- Allows you to pull from Social Feeds like PicPlz, Youtube, and Digg.com
Cons
- Very easy to accidentally exit out of.
- Due to limitations imposed by big news companies some feeds will only display properly if you have Pulse Reader display the website with the original news content.
Features:
Pulse News Reader is an excellent news application which displays user chosen news feeds in the style of a “colorful mosaic.” I have used this application for awhile and was excited to review it, because it really does change the way you view the news.
Pulse allows the user to select from a list of predefined news feeds or input new news feeds of their own. There are many great feeds included in the predefined list. Some of those included are The New York Times, Times Magazine, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, Life Hacker, Phandroid, Android Central, and Boy Genius Report. You can also choose between predefined packets of news that combine some of these news feeds to form one new independent feed. Some examples of this are Political News, Worldwide News, Android News, etc. If the news feed you want isn’t in the Pulse Reader list, *cough* Android Tapp *cough*, then you can navigate to the add feed page and add it your list so you don’t miss out on the latest app review!.
After you choose all of your feeds Pulse Reader displays these feeds in a unique collage of pictures representing the articles from the different sources. For each source you added you receive a row on your “news board” which displays the headline picture for each article in that feed along with a brief description. This means that if you have 20 different sources you have 20 different rows of articles and pictures. You can view the screenshots below to see exactly how this is applied, but the result is a very visually appealing interface akin to a magazine.
In order to view an article you just click on the image with the description that you wish to view and the “news board” disappears showing the article you just clicked on. At the bottom of the screen you will see all of the thumbnails for the row of the feed your article is in. This allows you to easily switch between articles in the same feed after you are done reading and adds to the slick feel of this application.
Pulse Reader isn’t only limited to news articles. In their latest updates they have also included support for feeds based on you and your friends profiles on Facebook and Twitter as well as Digg.com, PicPlz, Youtube, and Flickr. These allow you to see these social sources included in the mosaic of your other news feeds.
Another new addition to Pulse Reader is the ability to have multiple “news boards” or pages of content. You can create a page just for social feeds, another just for Android news, and another for world news and politics. In order to switch between these pages you just need to click the heading at the top of the screen of the page you want and it will display the new page of content with all of it’s corresponding articles.
Watch on Mobile
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Pulse News Reader Main Application News
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Pulse News Reader Article
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Pulse News Reader Browse all Categories
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Pulse News Reader Facebook Article Share
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Pulse News Reader Sharing Options
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Pulse News Reader Options
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Pulse News Reader Social Feeds
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Pulse News Reader Quick Tutorial
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Pulse News Reader
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Pulse News Reader Android Widget
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Pulse News Reader Reading Article
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Pulse News Reader Article Options
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Pulse News Reader Web View
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Pulse News Reader Manage Sources
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Pulse News Reader Manage Sources Featured
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Pulse News Reader Manage Sources Browse
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Pulse News Reader Article Sharing Options
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Pulse News Reader Facebook Links
Usefulness:
Pulse is an extremely useful and versatile news reader. It allows you to choose all of the content that you wish to view and displays it in a magazine style fashion. This makes it easier for you to find interesting and relevant news articles, as well as keep tabs on your friends on Facebook. I especially like the Facebook news feed “Friends’ Links.” This feature shows a feed which displays all of the links your friends have posted on Facebook. This is useful to see interesting links to new webpages that friends’ have posted which you would have otherwise missed.
Pulse Reader also makes it extremely easy for the user to add their own feeds which are not in the predefined list. In order to add Android Tapp I only had to type in “www.androidtapp.com.” I did not need to type in the address for the Feedburner RSS Feed. Pulse Reader also has the capability to pull in your RSS Feeds from Google Reader. This makes the transition much easier to use this program as your main news reading application.
Ease of Use:
Despite being so feature rich Pulse News Reader is extremely easy to use. The application loads up a tutorial screen when it launches to show you how to change the content of your “news boards.” The entire interface is clean and simplified in order to make using the application as easy as possible for the user. This is one of the easiest news applications I have ever used.
Frequently Used:
I use Pulse News Reader at least once a day in order to keep up with the latest news. This application is great because it allows you to take all of your news feeds and place them into a single viewer. Since I no longer need to use Google Reader or visit The New York Times homepage it cuts down on the time I spend looking for news every day. As a result I end up using this application whenever I am trying to keep up on the latest news.
Interface:
The interface for Pulse News Reader is clean and visually stunning. The layout of the application is designed both with aesthetics and ease of use in mind. This makes for a great experience when interacting with this application. I only have two complaints with the interface.
The first is that it is too easy to accidentally exit out of the application. Many of the functions of the application such as the article viewer or the feed adding process require you to hit the back button multiple times to return to your main page of news. If you hit the button one too many times it exits you out of the application without asking whether or not you intended to leave the application. This can be very annoying when you had another article in mind to read and you have to scroll back down in the application to locate it again.
My second complaint is the way that articles are displayed when you go in to view them. If the article you choose to read is in a fully utilized RSS Feed, like Android Tapp App Reviews, then the article formats great to view on your screen, loads quickly, and gives you a great reading experience. If the article was originally posted at a major news website like The New York Times, then the article will display only as synopsis since the major news corporation want you to visit their website in order to make money on advertising. Pulse News Reader does allow you to show articles on their native webpage, but the way this formats on your screen varies from news feed to news feed. This is probably a limitation which cannot be fixed by Pulse, but is a limitation all the same.