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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%
Holiday weekend giveaway: Early Edition for iPad delivers easy RSS
Who cares that it's Tuesday already? We're still going strong with our holiday weekend giveaways. Next up: the capable and pleasant 'Newspad' app The Early Edition, just revised to version 1.1. There's a lot of buzz today around a new contender in the iPad newsreader market, but it's good to see that one of the first apps out of the gate has now gained some big-time improvements. The new TEE takes the solid 'personal newspaper' metaphor of the first version and extends it with new features like Google Reader/OPML import, feed discovery from website URLs, custom sections, filtering and more. You can still skim and skip stories with ease, and quickly share articles via email or social networks. The app now gives you more feedback when stories are being fetched, and it will save your reading state so you come back to the same place when you exit and relaunch the app. The Early Edition for iPad will set you back US$4.99 in the App Store, but we have five promo codes to give away to five lucky readers. Just leave a comment below with your favorite non-Apple-related RSS feed (we don't want to influence your opinion by suggesting sites, and it's a random drawing anyway). Good luck! Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment on this post. The comment must be left before Friday, June 4 at 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. Five winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: One copy of The Early Edition app (Value: US$4.99) Click Here for complete Official Rules.
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.
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!
Google Reader Notifier for Mac OS X
I posted earlier this month of my love for the recently refreshed Google Reader, though for many users it's still missing one key feature: a notification utility for new headlines. Some newsreader apps and services have all sorts of widgets and menubar apps that can notify users of new content in their favorite feeds, and now the new Google Reader has one as well, the Google Reader Notifier (unofficial, not provided by Google). Based on GROSX (which worked on the previous version of Google Reader), this notifier can check your entire Google Reader account for new headlines, or you can give it a specific label to watch. While the Google Reader Notifier it doesn't provide popup notifications like Google's official notifiers, it can display an unread count. One downside to those who aren't quite as RSS obsessed as others is that it can only be set to check at intervals of 5, 10 or 30 minutes - there are no lengthier options like 1 hour, 3 hours, etc. Still, this is a nice utility that shakes hands well with a Google Labs service.Google Reader Notifier is free and available from the developer's site.
Vienna 2.1 preview
Some people have given us flack for focusing too much on one particular RSS reader, so I thought I would help the Vienna 2.1 preview. Vienna is a full featured open source RSS reader for OS X (and you know what means, it is free). 2.1 brings with it a host of new features including: A new 'Unified' layout Filter articles by various criteria Manual folder reordering And many more bug fixes. Vienna 2.1 also features my favorite blog in its screenshots. Head on over and try Vienna 2.1 out (it was able to import all of my subscriptions without a problem, all 700 of 'em).Thanks, Dave Jeffery.
NetNewsWire 2.1 released
After all the beta releases, the testing and the blood sweat and tears, NetNewsWire 2.1 has gone official. In case you've been living under a rock the past few months, this long-anticipated release of the most.popular.newsreader.evar includes major new features like syncing with NewsGator, posting to del.icio.us, emailing articles, printing and an interesting new sorting paradigm: by attention (has anyone heard anything about how well that one's actually working?).With this release, NNW is also now a Universal Binary and has received some major performance boosts on both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs. This is a free upgrade for owners of NNW 2.0, so what are you waiting for? Go get a copy.Ranchero notes that NetNewsWire Lite 2.1 is still in beta. Also, from what I remember, now that NetNewsWire 2.1 has gone official, I'm pretty sure that sale they had running is over.
Fast posting to del.icio.us with Pukka 1.0
Pukka (pronounced: puck-uh) is "a minimalist posting client for del.icio.us." It is a very slim but powerful stand-alone del.icio.us client that features tag auto-completion, handling of multiple accounts, Bonjour discovery of other Pukka users, bookmarklets, Growl alerts, .weblog and .url compatibility, keyboard navigation and more.It looks like a good amount of time and, perhaps more importantly, a lot of thought went into Pukka 1.0. I remember hearing its name when beta versions of NNW 2.1 started landing, which is another advantage Pukka has: it should be able to work with most newsreader apps that can either post links to del.icio.us with an external editor, or readers that use some kind of 'blog this' functionality.Pukka is a Universal Binary. A demo is available, and a license will cost a mere $5.
Write a plugin for endo
David Chartier likes endo so much that he banished NetNewsWire from his dock. High praise, I think, and now you can make endo do even more cool stuff by writing your very own plugins for it.endo ships with some pre-built plugins (one for Technorati and another for Flickr), but if you want to build your own you'll need to know some programming (namely Cocoa).
Shrook now free
Shrook, a full featured RSS reader for OS X, is now freeware according to Shrook developer Graham Parks. In an email to TUAW he assures us that development of Shrook will continue, the only thing that has changed is the price. Why the sudden change to freeware? To quote Graham, 'to piss off Brent Simmons if nothing else.'Hey, I'm all for spite creating freeware, though I think I'll stick with NetNewsWire myself.
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.
iPodderX now Transistr
Last month, at just around this time, we reported that iPodderX was in search of a new name. It seems that the seach is over, and after consulting with some lawyers (good idea, guys) Transistr has been choosen.Details are very light on what exactly Transistr will consist of, but it seems that it will be a newsreader as well as a 'podcatcher.'Thanks, iData
BlogBridge, a second look
BlogBridge might still be a little too rough around the edges to de-throne NetNewsWIre - the web's most popular newsreader on either Windows or OS X - but it has a rocking feature set that I think the folks at Ranchero/Newsgator had better start paying attention to. C.K. took a look at a 1.0 release of BlogBridge a while ago, and I think it's safe to say the app, now at version 2.7, has come quite a ways since then. The installation went smoothly, and signing up for BlogBridge's free web-based syncing service was easy, which brings me to one of BlogBridge's strong features: the app can not only sync newsfeeds, headlines and even preferences with a free, web-based newsreading service, but you can categorize newsfeeds with tags and sync those tags with del.icio.us.Since I have such a huge library of categorized feeds, one seemingly minor feature I really appreciate about BlogBridge is the ability to assign custom icons to the feed categories, making them much more easy to identify when trying to find just the right one. BlogBridge has quite a few other tricks up its sleeve, such as feed-rating and smartfeeds, which can pull keywords from your own feeds or parse tags and keywords from other services like Amazon, Feedster, Flickr, Google and Technorati.All in all, once some kinks get ironed out I think BlogBridge shows some real promise. It's is available as a free download, and since it's java and open source it runs on OS X, Linux and Windows.
