PulseNewsReader
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Stanford University and Apple: A beautiful relationship
Apple, Inc. and Stanford University go together like apple pie and ice cream -- they're outstanding on their own, but put them together and you have something very special. USA Today's Talking Tech reported on the close ties between Apple and Stanford in a posting and video last week. Many people are aware of the relationship between the university in Palo Alto and the company in Cupertino from the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. In the book, Jobs is often taking long walks "in the hills above the Stanford University campus," he gave his famous 2005 commencement speech ("Stay hungry. Stay foolish.") at Stanford, and son Reed Jobs attends the university. But the largest connection between Stanford and Apple these days is in the way that many Stanford grads, students, and dropouts are making it rich as iOS developers. The university's entrepreneurial atmosphere has given birth to a gaggle of startups, many of which are well-known to iPad and iPhone users. Talking Tech's Jefferson Graham discusses Ankit Gupta, a Stanford student credited with helping create the highly successful Pulse News Reader. Ge Wang, the Stanford assistant professor who co-founded music app-maker Smule, has created virtual musical instrument apps for iPhone and iPad. He hired recent graduate Nick Kruge, who created the fun and unique MadPad app. Graham also highlights Matt Sullivan and Zach Weiner, creators of the Storytree app that is a finalist for the SXSW Interactive Awards tonight. Weiner, who is still a senior at Stanford, notes that developing apps and starting companies "is just really kind of emblazoned into the culture here," in reference to the university. Graham's interview of several past and present Stanford students who are making their name in the app world is embedded below.
Updated: Pulse News Reader for iOS now free
If you were intrigued by our former coverage of Pulse, a slick reimagining of how RSS feeds can work on the iPad and iPhone, but were put off by the modest asking price, here's a good way to start your week. As the New York Times reports, Alphonso Labs has secured $800k in venture capital funding and is moving to a different business model. It is now trying to "attract more users, and with them, paid partnerships with publishers and advertisers." This sounds like we'll end up with in-app ads in the long run, but for the moment, none are present. It's also likely that it'll be doing more deals with content producers to spotlight their feeds in the "featured" section of the app, which is a less intrusive way for them to generate revenue. If you've never used Pulse, it's more like Flipboard than traditional RSS readers, like Reeder. It arranges feed content into attractive, image-heavy scrolling areas that try to create the feel of a glossy personalized magazine. This is both a strength and a weakness -- it works better with some types of feeds than others -- but overall it provides a pleasant way to catch up with the news over your breakfast. Update: following numerous commenters expressing concerns that, having paid for a previous version of Pulse, they would now be subjected to ads, we contacted Alphonso Labs for a statement. Click through to see what it said.
Pulse News Reader for iPad 2.0: More sources, better organization
Alphonso Labs reported today that their Pulse News Reader for iPad (currently US $1.99) has been updated to version 2.0. The new version of the app addresses one of the major complaints about the original by allowing up to 60 news feeds to be added, with up to 12 feeds on each of five pages. Organization of sources is much easier in the new version. Each one of the five pages has a tab that can be renamed, so users can define each page by type -- for example, "Apple," "Food," "News," and more. The feeds are listed under each tab and can be dragged around to be placed in the order you would like to see them. It's also easier to find sources; when you go to add a source, there are tabs for "featured" and "categories," both featuring sources that look good in Pulse. Alphonso Labs calls this the "Pulse Bazaar." The app seems snappier than the previous version also, both at startup and while loading or refreshing pages. I'm not sure if it's new, but it's possible to add both your Facebook and Twitter feeds to Pulse, with any post with a photo or link in it showing up in your Pulse list. There's also support for Bump, so you can share feeds with friends who have both Bump and Pulse installed. Sounds like a great update -- if you've had issues with the app previously, it's worth giving it another look.
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.
TUAW review and giveaway: Pulse News Reader
A few days ago, I did a quick first look at Pulse News Reader for iPad. It's a very different RSS reader for the iPad platform, developed by two Stanford grad students. Since that post, I've had enough time to really give the app a try and I'm happy to say it's now my RSS reader of choice. The concept of Pulse (US$3.99) is different from most RSS readers. As you can see in the gallery at the bottom of this post page, Pulse provides a manageable grid of boxes on the iPad display instead of trying to cram as many post headlines into as little space as possible. Each row of boxes is a feed, with the most recent post in a box on the left and older posts streaming to the right. The app is fast. One of my major complaints about some of the other news readers is that while they're out pulling in new feed info, they just bog down. Likewise, some of the other iPad news readers I've used have a tendency to really slow down when they're syncing read status. That's not the case with Pulse. Since it currently allows a maximum of 20 feeds and the last 40 posts for each feed, it's fast to update. In fact, it's usually done updating feeds by the time the Pulse splash screen disappears. %Gallery-94307%
Found Footage: Pulse News Reader for iPad
I've been looking for an iPad RSS news reader for a while, and was totally underwhelmed by what was out there. Fortunately, a reader pointed me to a video demonstrating Pulse News Reader (US$3.99), a new RSS reader from a couple of Stanford grad students. Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari have created an RSS reader that makes traditional readers look like, well, cluttered inboxes. If you're one of those folks who follows a few hundred RSS feeds, you may not like Pulse -- the current version has a limit of 20 feeds. The app makes it drop-dead simple to add feeds by searching keywords, and then picking feeds from the search results. The feeds show up as a series of tabbed rows of articles with the newest posts on the far left, oldest on the far right. Navigating posts is done by flicking left or right, and you can read the full post by tapping on the large post icon. Pulse 1.1 still needs some work -- the current version doesn't support video, so the post icon for this article would appear as text only. Still, it looks great and is easily one of the most usable news readers I've seen. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that TUAW is one of their featured sources in the app... We'll have a more thorough TUAW review of Pulse News Reader soon. Thanks to Graham for the tip! [via Cult of Mac]
