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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.
Listen to your news feeds with Noodle Reader
Pfft, "reading" is sooo 1990's. Check out Noodle Reader from Sonic Amigos. With it, you can listen to any number of animated "talking heads" read your news feeds to you. Select the character you want (or create your own), the background and the voice. At first you're limited to the built-in Apple voices, which are pretty robotic, but Noodle Reader is compatible with system voices produced by Cepstral, which are much more realistic. You can even create a sort of "news show" featuring headlines from several sources and several news anchors. Sure, it's kind of gimmicky, but still fun.Noodle Reader requires Mac OS 10.3 or later and a single license will run you $20US.
