PulseNews
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Pulse News comes to your favorite web browser
There have been many times when I have wishes that my favorite news aggregators like Pulse news and Zite for iOS were available on my desktop or Mac laptop. Pulse News has answered my requests with a web version of the app that runs in any browser. You can log into your Pulse News account and get all the sites and feeds you normally graze in the iOS app displayed right in Safari, Firefox, or Chrome. The Pulse developers also had some help and probably a wee bit of cash from Microsoft to make the app work nicely with Windows 8 touch capabilities. There's a nice Windows Explorer logo in the upper right part of your browser, no matter which browser you are running. Anyway, Pulse News works just fine with Safari, and unlike the iOS versions you get some choice in layouts, mainly adjustments to the size of the tiles. If you change the shape of your browser window, Pulse news obliges and re-arranges itself. All in all, it's a nice experience. I saw a few rendering issues where words would get cut off and there was occasionally some odd image cropping, but basically it's working pretty well. Single-click on a tile, and you get a clean render of the story, with the familiar controls to read it directly at the source or email it to someone else. This is a nice evolutionary step for Pulse News, and I'll use it often. You can take a look at it by going to the Pulse website and logging in if you have a free account, or you can create a new account and start publishing your own personal news source.
Pulse News for iOS adds local content for many cities
Pulse News for iOS has added a local category to its news aggregation app. The change puts hundreds of local news sources into the Pulse app, which can make the app a 1 stop destination for a lot of users. As far as I know this is the first news app that has offered tailored local content. Partners include Patch (from our owners AOL), which is available in 800 US cities, and some other regional and suburban publishers have joined up as well. In addition to local news, the app offers localized deals from Groupon, Living Social and Gift City. A new local sports category has content from SBNation, Bleacher Report, and CBS Sports. Finally, the app has added Zagat restaurant info and local food blogs to help users find the best meals in their areas. I tried the app today to generally good results. I didn't see any info from Patch (they don't do anything here in Arizona), but the other categories populated quickly. Local news has been pretty much ignored by most of the news aggregation apps, so this is a good step for news junkies who find it easier to get news from Afghanistan than their own backyard. The Pulse News app does not require an update. The new feature is added at the server side, so users only have to add a new content source to see the local news options.
Pulse News updated with source syncing
Apple Design Award-winning Pulse News has been updated with Pulse Sync, a new feature that allows for instant syncing of sources across devices for anyone with a free pulse.me account. In my case, I have Pulse News on both my iPhone and iPad; adding a new source to my news feed on the iPhone will automatically sync it to the news feed on my iPad. It's a great new feature that works quite seamlessly, and it ensures I have essentially the same news reading experience no matter which device I'm using. I did notice a small snag during the initial setup. I enabled Pulse Sync on my iPhone first, which turned out to be an unfortunate error on my part -- my iPad has been my primary device for Pulse, with all my feeds set up exactly how I wanted them. Enabling Pulse Sync on the iPhone first meant Pulse Sync assumed my iPhone's feed was how I wanted things set up on all of my devices, and I couldn't find any way to back out of that. I wound up having to manually re-order my news sources on my iPad, but the good news is after I did that those changes automatically propagated back to my iPhone. Pulse News is free for both the iPhone and iPad, and it has built-in support for Instapaper, Evernote, Read It Later, and Reader. Pulse is hands-down the best news reader I've used on any device, well-deserving of the Apple Design Award it won this year, and it's an app that all iOS users should have on their devices.
Pulse News app now saves and syncs
Pulse News app for the iPhone and iPad received a nice update today allowing selected stories to be saved and automatically synced to other Pulse News apps you have or retrieved via the web. Sign-up for the service is free and can be done from within the Pulse News app. All that's required is a user-name and a password. When you see a story you want to save, click on the star symbol. If, for example, you did that on your iPhone, you can pick up your iPad and the saved story will be there too, assuming you have a web connection. The story is also accessible from the Pulse.me website. Saved stories can also be sent to Instapaper, Evernote or Read It Later. If you import newsfeeds from Google Reader, marked stories will also mark them in Google Reader. After some difficulty with iTunes this morning, I was able to download the app for both the iPhone and iPad. Saving a story on either device made it immediately available on the other. It's a nice feature. With the links to the web component, I'd really like to be able to set up my master set of sources on one app and have them sync to the other, but at least for now, it's not a feature Pulse provides. %Gallery-125192%
Pulse News pushes out a significant update for iPhone news junkies
Pulse has been a major player in the news aggregation world, garnering good reviews from TUAW and users. Pulse has released version 2.0 for the iPhone and a good program has become even better. Here's a quick summary of the improvements: Triple the news sources A personalization option Improved speed. The better performance was immediately obvious when I used it Better search that now includes most popular news feeds This release in general brings Pulse up to the standard of the iPad release. The update now requires iOS 4.0 or above. I check Pulse several times a day and find it very useful. I'm also loving Zite, which I reviewed last week. Zite is iPad-only, but it is a great way to quickly see what is happening in your areas of interest. On the iPad, I use both apps and get the best of both. Zite is better for discovery of news and information, Pulse News is more restricted to what you tell it you want, but in this latest iPhone release Pulse is moving toward a discovery model as well. Try them both. They are free and I think you'll really like the results you get.
