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Pocket brings its 'read it later' service to Mac App Store, keeps its free status
We know Pocket has had a strong presence on iOS, Android and other platforms for quite some time now, but today the service formerly known as Read it Later announced it is now making its way to a bigger Cupertino screen. Naturally, Pocket's new application isn't much different than its mobile versions, meaning it'll offer the same offline access, save-for-later features as it currently does on the mobile front but with a more "native Mac experience" -- of course, this includes the ability to sync across multiple devices, stream videos and share tidbits via those cherished social networks. What's more, Pocket won't be charging a dime for its novel and handy OS X app, though this shouldn't come as a surprise given the outfit's somewhat recently adopted no-cost model -- still, it's a gesture most people will certainly appreciate, and one you Mac folk can start enjoying now by downloading from to the desktop-based App Store.%Gallery-169277%
Read it Later becomes Pocket, drops its price to free
Skimming the news later is no match for consuming it fresh, but we still live in a world with connectivity dead zones -- riding the subway, cruising the Pacific at 35,000 feet -- making an offline reading app a necessity for oft-disconnected consumers. Pocket, formerly known as "Read it Later," lets you save online content to read when you're not within web's reach, or even when you are. Pocket could also be a good resource for folks that stumble upon some interesting content, but simply don't have time to read it at that very moment. You can also grab videos and images to watch later -- everything is presented in a clean, easy to view format, searchable by publication, keyword or custom tags. And while the former version -- Read it Later -- ran you a cool 99 cents, Pocket is free, and available now for Android, iOS and the Kindle Fire.
Google Currents app updated with international support, offline reading
Folks in the US have been able to use the Google Currents app to read various websites (including this one) with more of a magazine-style layout since late last year, and now those outside the country can finally get in on the act as well. Google has today rolled out version 1.1 of the app for Android and iOS, which makes the service available worldwide with support for 44 languages, and adds a number of other improvements including the ability to select which editions have images for offline reading, instant online sync, translation for 38 languages and a promised 7X performance boost. As before, the app is completely free, and adapts the layout to suit both phones and tablets. Hit the links below to download it for the platform of your choice.
Google introduces Currents: magazine-like news reader for Android and iOS (video)
Google's rumored Flipboard competitor is finally here, and it's ditched the Propeller codename for something a little more appropriate: Currents. The app is available for both Android and iOS -- in tablet and phone-friendly formats -- and delivers a more magazine like reading experience for perusing your consumable content. The free app offers you a swipeable, graphics-heavy way to read material from partners like AllThingsD, PBS, Huffington Post and Fast Company, as well public Google+ feeds and RSS. You can even import your Google Reader subscriptions -- and it all gets cached for offline viewing. Of course, the whole thing is integrated with Google+ too, for quick and easy sharing. For publishers, Google is providing self-service tools for customizing how their content is displayed in the app. You can go download it now in the Android Market and in the iTunes App Store for free but, before you go, check out the video after the break to see it in action. Update: It looks like Currents is US only for the time being. Sorry international readers, you'll just have to find some other way to shove traditional magazines towards extinction.
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.
Reeder for Mac now available on Mac App Store
Reeder, a popular Google Reader client on iOS, is now out of beta and available on the Mac App Store. While the beta version of Reeder for the Mac was free to test, the 1.0 release will set you back US$9.99, more than twice the price of the iPad version. That $9.99 offers syncing with Google Reader (which you can set up for free), plus integration with Readability, Instapaper, ReadItLater, Pinboard, Delicious, Zootool and more. The app has a customizable, multi-column interface that's superficially similar to the iPad version, and Reeder includes gesture support and customizable shortcuts. If you read a lot of news on your Mac, Reeder definitely looks like a big step up from reading RSS feeds in Safari or Mail. We've got several Reeder fans on the TUAW staff, and one of them will likely be providing a full review of Reeder in the near future.
Ongo for iPad is a good start, but it's far from a home run
We told you yesterday that Ongo was on the way to the iPad. It's now on the App Store, and I've had some time to play with it. Ongo is a joint venture by several newspaper companies to create a paid, ad-free news aggregator that is easy to use and will appeal to the news junkie. After some hours using the app, I found it attractively designed and easy to use. You can see and share top stories from several publications like the New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post. The app doesn't cache much, so reading offline does not appear to be an option. You can save stories, called clippings, but once saved, I could not retrieve them without a data connection. The app allows you to sort news by type, like US or Arts and Entertainment, but there are no sections for tech (!) or even politics. It seems a glaring omission. You can certainly read stories on those subjects, but you can't sort them on your own. All the news in Ongo is created by a staff of five editors, so you're not getting the full NYT or USA Today. The staff choose what will be available, which I found troubling. Also, when searching for "Opinion," I only got material from the Washington Post. Worse yet, Hints from Heloise came up under the "Opinion" heading, with tips on cleaning pewter. Sorry, but I don't think that was a good editorial choice. There is a search function, and a query for Steve Jobs brought up many stories, none of which were relevant. They were just stories that mentioned someone named Steve and had the word "jobs" somewhere in them. An identical search in Google News worked perfectly. %Gallery-115241%
Ongo News app coming to iPad
Ongo is something new for news consumers. It just launched on the Web this week and has just been released for the iPad late this afternoon. It's a collaboration between The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and others to provide a subscription news service for US$6.99 a month. The aim is to provide readers with the best of those papers and other media outlets that join up. They already have the Financial Times and newspapers from Boston, Charlotte, Louisville, Detroit, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Miami on board, among others. Some of the content providers provide complete access. Other content is curated. Some content is an additional $0.99 a month, but other publications can cost up to $14.99, which is just a tad pricey. You can sign up for a free day pass or get 30 days free if you want to test drive the concept. I tried the web version on my iPad, and generally it worked well just using Safari. You can change the size of the text, save and share stories and search for topics. I had some trouble launching stories, as the app sometimes failed to register a finger tap. Ongo will be in competition with Rupert Murdoch's new publication, The Daily, which is due this month at almost half the price. Ongo is ad-free, and it will be interesting to see if people are willing to pay for news that is generally free on the Web. The browser interface is intuitive and a nice environment to read in, but ultimately the consumer will decide how it all shakes out. We'll review the iPad app soon. %Gallery-115155%
Is the Apollo News Reader defunct?
I liked the Apollo New Reader for iPad. It allowed you to read RSS feeds full screen, something that the Pulse news reader doesn't do in landscape mode. Another advantage was that it could usually play video from within the app. Note: One of our sharp commenters notes that you can play a video in Pulse by holding the play button down for more than 2 seconds. Cool. Alas, good things come to an end; the Apollo News Reader is no longer listed in the App Store, and the freshest stories are 6 days old. The iPhone version of the app is also M.I.A. I recently reported that the app was not updating, but the developers said they expected to have it back up soon. The issue seemed to be some disagreements with some content providers over whether Apollo could use their material. There hasn't been any response from the developers on this latest outage, so if I could hazard a guess I'd say that the app won't be back. There is nothing on the Hawthorne Labs website that would give me any insight into what's going on. Once billed as "the Newspaper of the Future," for now the Apollo app doesn't seem to have any future at all. I hope it comes back, but I'm not holding my breath.
Pulse News Reader for iPad update makes you a news editor
A new update to Pulse News Reader for iPad now lets you mash up your own mix of news for others to subscribe to. The update to version 1.1.4, which went live last evening, provides each user with their own "pulse" if they so desire. What's a pulse? It's actually a Posterous blog (with a pulsememe.com domain name). If you're looking through some of your feeds in Pulse News Reader and see a post that you'd like your friends or followers to read, just tap on the "heart" icon and the post is added to your pulse. Followers can subscribe to your pulse in Pulse News Reader for iPad by searching for your name or handle in the app, then searching under Pulse Users. For example, if anyone wants to see what news I'm excited about, they can subscribe to Steve Sande. Whether it's a news item I've added from another site or something that I've written and posted to my Pulsememe blog, it gets published and the world gets to read it. If friends or followers aren't Pulse users, they can still follow what I'm interested in by going to the blog that's created at stevesande.pulsememe.com. Now here's the cool thing. If a lot of people are tapping the heart icon for a specific post, it ends up on the top stories page at Pulsememe.com. People who add a lot of posts are considered top editors and are listed on the Pulsememe page. In other words, this becomes a way for hot news items on the blogs you follow to rise to the top of the Internet heap, at least for a while. If there's anything I'm not happy about, it's that I can't connect this to my existing Posterous blog -- it ends up going into the special Pulsememe blog instead. The update is free to current users of Pulse News Reader for iPad, and the My Pulse feature should be making it to the iPhone version soon. Take a look at the gallery below for a few screenshots. %Gallery-98785%
Pulse News Reader now in convenient smaller size for iPhone, iPod touch
The Pulse News Reader for iPad (US$3.99) gained some notoriety last month when the stylish app was released, then promptly yanked from the App Store by Apple at the behest of The New York Times. The Times did not want their RSS feed featured in Pulse; changes were made and the app has been back in the App Store since about June 8th. Now comes word from developer Alphonso Labs that a new version of the app -- Pulse News Mini ($2.99) -- is now available for iPhone and iPod touch. It's iOS 4.0 tested, and from a quick look at the app, it does an amazing job of putting the functionality of Pulse into a smaller form factor. As you can see from the video above, Pulse News Mini looks quite similar to the iPad app. Of course, the individual pieces of the Pulse "mosaic" are smaller, but the way that users interact with Pulse is identical. Up to 20 news feeds may be added, with the ability to search by keywords to find those feeds. A tap on a story expands it to fill the screen. The rest of the stories in the feed are listed below, but can be hidden with a touch. I was pleased to see that Alphonso Labs took one of my suggestions to heart. As a writer, I like to see who is writing posts for various blogs. The initial versions of Pulse did not have this feature, but Pulse News Mini shows the author byline in the feed. In the currently shipping version of Pulse, 1.0.1, photos associated with posts did not appear to load properly. I'd love to see some way to sync the feeds on the iPad and iPhone versions to avoid re-entry of feeds between devices. If the developer responds as quickly to this request as they did to the my previous suggestion, we should see that feature implemented quickly.
iPad Pulse Reader app goes from keynote hero to App Store zero thanks to NYT (update -- it's back!)
Pulse News Reader -- a news aggregating app for the iPad -- got itself the ultimate stamp of approval yesterday by being featured in Steve Jobs' keynote speech. A few hours later, however, Apple had removed the application from its App Store, following a complaint by the New York Times that it was infringing on its rights. Although Pulse collates publicly available RSS feeds, the fact it costs $4 a pop is being interpreted as a "commercial use" of those feeds, and therefore a violation of the New York Times and Boston Globe's Terms of Use. Its makers have said they'll be getting in touch with Apple and stripping out the offending content, but it's certainly a head scratcher of a decision by the news company. We wonder if this signals the start of a crusade against all paid RSS readers or if Pulse has something peculiarly intolerable about it. Visit the source link to read the complaint in full. Update: From what we're reading, it sounds like what the NYT is really complaining about is that its feeds are preloaded into Pulse, and that Pulse is using NYT content and images in its promotional materials, not that Pulse is a paid app. Seems like those are easy fixes -- we'll see what happens. Update 2: And it's back! As we guessed, it looks like all Pulse had to do was resubmit without preloading the NYT's RSS feed and take some new screenshots of different sites, so that's just peachy. Still, it's insanely troublesome that Apple's first response is to just pull apps without verifying any claims or allowing devs to respond -- your store is still broken, Steve, no matter what percentage of apps you're approving.
BuzzVoice reads aloud to you almost anywhere
BuzzVoice can most simply be described as a talking reader for over 1400 blogs, but saying that doesn't begin to do it justice. It's not just an iPhone/iPod touch app, although BuzzVoice provides one [iTunes Link]. It's a platform that can be enjoyed on a variety of devices including any iPod or mp3 player, your computer, Blackberry (upcoming) or with added functionality on the iPhone/iPod touch running OS 2.0 to use the basics, or OS 3.0 or better, to use in-app email. BuzzVoice is the butterfly that emerged from chrysalis of the now defunct PimpMyNews app, a talking reader with far less functionality. What it grew into is a full system that starts on your computer at the BuzzVoice site. There you can sign up for a free account and explore the 1400 different blogs that BuzzVoice can read to you. The site allows you to listen to individual stories and to email a story that, when received, contains an audio file of the story, as well as the ability to visually read the story either on the site or by being transferred to the originating blog. The BuzzVoice site lets you create a list of MyFeeds in where you build a list of the blogs you are interested in hearing by either searching, browsing or picking a ready made playlist based on specific interests. This is handy and becomes quite important when we get to the iPhone app. The site also lets you put together a Buzzcast, which is a grouping of blogs that you like, and have that grouping transform into a 10 minute (for the free version) or 30 minute (for the pro version) personal podcast that, after a click, will be added to iTunes and update daily, so it can be heard throughout the iPod line. A feed is also displayed for use with a non-iTunes powered device. How does it sound? I was expecting to be disappointed since I have had enough of the 'take-me-to-your-leader' type vocal stylings of many talking apps, but I'm very happy to report that the voice implementation is nearly perfect. It sounds quite natural with great attention paid to punctuation. You can choose a male voice or female voice or have BuzzVoice mix it up, using the pro version. For free you get one voice. The sound was good enough to allow me to stop paying attention to the player and start giving my full attention to the story being read. This is not a small thing if you're going to listen to more than a story or two. The iPhone app (selling now for $US1.99) ties in nicely to the site and provides additional goodies. On the bottom of the screen are four buttons. MyPlaylist displays all the blogs that you put into MyFeeds on the site. Tap one and you'll see the current story list, tap a story and it will be read to you. If you tap the blue arrow to the right of each story a second screen lets you share a story via Facebook to Reddit (plus 4 others) or email. You can tap Listen to hear the story, or tap Source to read the story in BuzzVoice, which doesn't present in landscape mode, or Safari, which does. Tapping My Buzzcast will play the Buzzcast that you created on the site without having to go to iTunes. The third button, BuzzRadio, is interesting. Tapping it brings up a listing of topics ranging from Apple Radio to Politics Radio to Sports Radio. There are currently eight stations to choose from. When you pick one, a grouping of top stories from various subject-specific blogs gets built, which BuzzVoice then reads; perfect for any time your hands should be somewhere else (driving, running or whatever). You don't get this on the site. I'd like to see a non-variable, or user designated playing time for the stations. As it is now, I've found that playing time can vary from 4 minutes to 30 minutes. I can see that being a problem when driving and expecting a longer read. Once that is fixed, I'd like to be able to stack stations so if I know that I'll be in the car for 90 minutes and I know that each station plays for 30 minutes, I would be able to stack 3 topic-oriented stations which would then be sequentially read to me, filling up my 90 minute drive. The fourth button is 'Info' which doesn't really provide any. Instead, it opens up an email where you can report mispronunciations, suggest blogs or ask for help. It would be nice to see a little tutorial on this page. In the iPhone app, when you receive mail sent from BuzzVoice, either from the site or from another iPhone, you get a link bringing you to a BuzzVoice-formatted Safari page with a big Listen to this story button on top and the full story with graphics displayed below. This is a very nice feature.
Fluent Mobile releases the first news aggregator iPhone app
Fluent Mobile has released an innovative news oriented iPhone app that may be a game changer. The Fluent Mobile app aggregates mobile ready content from multiple content providers. According to M:Metrics in January of this year, mobile news sites were visited over 63 million times and the number is growing. This is a huge market. Currently 1.5% of all web content is Google optimized and nicely formatted for mobile devices and the number is increasing. Fluent Mobile takes advantage of this content and aggregates it, creating a news portal with content from Bloomberg for business, ESPN for sports, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News and USA Today, among others, for news. Upon launch, content will be provided by 32 separate sources and more will be added as relevant sites become mobile enhanced. For the first time an app provides one-stop shopping for news.The information is organized well, allowing you to choose from a number of categories including U.S. News, Entertainment, Sports, Business, and Travel.
TapLynx - Create iPhone focused newsreader applications without programming
Users of NewsGator's NetNewsWire iPhone news reader have been waiting with bated breath for the next iteration of the application, with the promise of the ability to mark news items unread and send articles to InstaPaper Instapaper, amongst other enhancements. As time has gone on, it became clear that Brent Simmons was working on other projects that are related to (but most decidedly not) the next iteration of NetNewsWire for the iPhone. So what has been keeping him busy? As it turns out, NewsGator is rolling out an entire iPhone framework called TapLynx, which will allow its users to create content-rich topic-focused newsreader applications. The first such application, the All Things Digital iPhone app, was created by Simmons himself. The goal of TapLynx is to offer users a framework that allows them to simply choose some images, set URLs for content feeds, and generate a media application for the iPhone without requiring any programming. TapLynx is currently not even yet in beta, but you can sign up to get an alpha invitation on the TapLynx site. By the way, for the NetNewsWire iPhone fans out there, it turns out that the next iteration of the app will be based on TapLynx, so even though it doesn't seem like there has been much recent movement, things are still progressing. We may even see the ability for NetNewsWire (both the Mac and iPhone versions) to synchronize with Google Reader accounts.
Evangelion PS3 is, disappointingly, not a game
If you thought Cellius was finally going to bear a new game thanks to yesterday's Evangelion reveal ... then you're going to feel as crushed as we are upon hearing this. The Evangelion project isn't a game, but yet another anime-linked service, much like the previously shown Gundam VOD thing -- and honestly, it's even less fascinating than the Gundam one. For ¥800 a month, starting June 6, Japanese PS3 owners can get a 3D news reader for their system which features Misato from Evangelion. ... Still with us? Good, because we're about to hit the only interesting part of this story: Misato's voice will be completely computer-generated. Namco chose to go this way since it was deemed impossible to hire a voice actor for everyday news reading. According to Famitsu (via Andriasang), Cellius is using Ruby Talk to make the incredibly life-like voice for Misato. Although this feature sounds rather nice, it's not enough to justify shelling out eight dollars a month. For once, this is something Japan can keep for itself.Source: AndriasangSource: Famitsu
endo: powerful RSS reader updates for Safari 3 beta
Since Adriaan Tijsseling makes one of the Mac's best blogging clients, it only makes sense that he also has a slick RSS newsreader called endo that we honestly don't stay on top of as much as we should.With features like a custom Growl-like alert window which allows you to read snippets of feed items before actually bringing endo to the front, a powerful subscription manager, and a feature-packed download manager with options for adding media to iTunes and even BitTorrent controls, endo brings some clever stuff to the table with a unique UI. Upon opening endo for the first time, a short setup process allows you to enter users names and URLs to track activity and comments at sites like your Flickr account and a personal blog. The headline list on the left features favicons for your individual feeds to help you pick out items from different sites easier, as well as color labels for subscriptions and even a customizable summary + tag display below each headline. To summarize: if you want features and power - endo is a great choice. I bring all this up again because endo was yet another app that is affected by the Safari 3 beta, which includes a new version of the WebKit rendering engine than many Mac OS X apps, including endo, use to display web content. Fortunately, Adriaan has produced an update that accounts for this fix, which you should be able to grab by starting up endo or heading over to kula software and downloading a fresh copy.Another perk of endo is that, even though it's one of the most powerful and feature-packed RSS readers on the market, it only costs $17.95 for a license. Adriaan even offers a bundle deal that includes both endo + ecto for a savings of $10 at a mere total cost of $26.95 - those are some good deals for blogging + newsreading software.
Widget Watch: iActu
Today's widget is quite nice. iActu USA pulls news feeds from six American newspapers. You can browse the first few lines of each article, jump to any section of the paper, select one of sixteen available skins and specify the source for the ticker at the top of the widget. Of course, the full articles are a click away. Finally, registering the pro version ($6.95US) will let you print articles directly from the widget. There is also a French version.Thanks, Simohamed El Alj!
NNW booted from my Dock, long live endo!
Scott posted on endo yesterday, and today I am happy to report that NNW has gone to that giant "poof" in the ex-Dock sky. Sure, endo has some minor "it's a 1.0 release" quirks, but this is the newsreader I've been waiting for. After putting it through its paces last night I was happy to dethrone NetNewsWire's place in my Dock, and here's why.First and foremost is NetNewWire's age. Version 2.x is old, and it's starting to feel like it hasn't been touched in a while, possibly due to it's dominance in the newsreading market or the NewsGator buyout. Now I don't mean any disrespect; Ranchero is a great company and NetNewsWire both initiated me into and carried me through the newsreading market for a couple of years now. endo simply feels like it pays a little more attention to the market and is aiming to evolve with it, as it offers some really slick integration and headline organizing options. Headlines can be added to a del.icio.us account right from within endo, without the need for snarky applescripts that make me leave the app to do the actual bookmarking in a browser.On the topic of feed management, endo is very customizable, with the ability to set refresh rates for each group and/or feed (and disabling them altogether) and even the ability to colorize particular feed's headlines so they're easier to pick out in a crowd. endo also offers a Growl-like notification system, toggled per feed, that allows you to sift through snippets of new headlines and short summaries while leaving endo minimized or even hidden. The headline column on the left is also quite tweakable, as summaries and tags can be displayed in-line with the headlines, or you can completely turn off both of those items as I have in my screenshot. To round up the feed management angle: for all those times when you can't get online, endo has the ever-obvious "offline" option.
