[Update 7/21: Pulse 1.0.2 was recently released and addressed some of the issues I had with the app, particularly the loading times and scrolling speed.]
What Pulse seems to specialize in (and these are my words, not developer Alphonso Studios ‘) is a more fluid web reading experience, and, at its best, the app feels more like a good e-magazine with customized content than a list of feeds that you trail your finger down.
[click on a thumbnail to see an enlarged view]
The way that Pulse organizes your news contributes a lot to its e-magazine feel. There are no folders or unread counts for your feeds, and you can display up to 20 of them in one vertical list. Each feed displays three thumbnails worth of posts at a time, and you can swipe horizontally on a feed to display more items. You can add feeds to Pulse manually (by keyword, not URL) or by syncing your Google Reader account.
Browsing Feeds
Tapping on a post within a feed will open it up full-screen and dim its thumbnail to mark it as read. Pulse caches text and thumbnails (in the main list view) for offline reading, but pictures within posts require an internet connection to be seen.
The usual ‘next/prev ‘ buttons, which are present while viewing a post in other RSS readers, are missing in Pulse. What you get instead is actually a lot more interesting and interactive.
Tapping on the bottom of the screen will bring up the same feed interface that you see in Pulse ‘s main view, but restricted to show only the posts from the feed you ‘re in. This lets you browse a particular feed just like you would a website, but without having to navigate a generic iPhone-optimized mobile theme.
If you find something you like, sharing interesting items from within Pulse is a two-tap process. There’s a “share” button in the top-right corner of the screen, and tapping on that will bring up the option to share via Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, or save the article to Instapaper.
Pulse is different
Pulse isn’t like other RSS apps, and it can be a bit of a shock to your reading system if you’re used to seeing your feeds as a gigantic text list.
Since you can only see three items at a time in the feed browser, it ‘s hard to tell where you are in the chronology of the feed. You actually have to swipe left or right to check for posts, instead of using a scroll bar to check your position at a glance. The omission of an unread counter can also be disorienting.
However, I ‘m not totally convinced that this is a bad thing ” it ‘s just different. Pulse ‘s layout is all about making content on the page shine, and every single post within my feeds looks great. I find myself taking a little more time when reading in Pulse, in much the same way that I read the Wired magazine from cover to cover.
The ultra visual layout also gives each post an extra chance to grab my attention. Not all RSS headlines are eye-catching, but the pictures can be, and the thumbnails appended as a background to each post in the feed view have drastically increased the number of posts that end up going full screen.
I ‘ve also started paring down the amount of crap that I read in Pulse so that I can make it my personalized version of Wired, so that almost every post is worth a tap. It’s like paying $3 to become publisher of my own magazine.
A Few Small Repairs
Now that I ‘ve showered Pulse with a sufficient amount of praise, let ‘s get to the part where I start whining like a spoiled brat:
A few more browsing options, please — as much as I like the idea of browsing Pulse like a website or magazine, it can sometimes feel a little crowded. Read posts appear dimmed on the feed views, but I ‘d also love the option to hide them all together. I ‘ve also had a few recurring issues with several ‘read ‘ posts marking themselves as ‘unread ‘ after a refresh of the app. It ‘s also still a little too hard to know how recently a feed has been refreshed, or how much more content you have to see. Web sites have scroll bars, magazines have pages, but Pulse ‘s 3-post view can feel too too limiting. I also wish there was a gesture or button to bring me right back to the ‘top ‘ of a feed after swiping all the way to the oldest posts.
Loading times — I have 20 feeds loaded in Pulse (I have double that in Reeder), and, despite the fact that only post thumbnails and text are cached for offline reading, the app can still take up to a minute to refresh in the morning. Compared to the six to ten seconds that Reeder takes, Pulse can feel *very* slow to load up. My first preference would be to have this load time decreased significantly, but, if it really can ‘t be helped, the addition of iOS 4 Task Completion would also suffice. That way I could simply load the app up in the morning, leave it to refresh in the background, and return after checking my e-mail. I ‘m assuming that task completion isn ‘t too far off, since Pulse supports iOS 4 task app switching right out the door.
Conclusion
If the devs can implement even a few of the items on my wishy-washy wish list, I could definitely see myself using it as my portal to Google Reader on the iPhone. However, even in its current iteration, Pulse makes a great case for its alternative, highly visual approach to feed reading.
All of your content is stretched vertically and horizontally across the screen, like digital arteries delivering the news straight from the heart of the Internet — and all you have to do to check your Pulse is put your finger on the screen.
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Pulse News Mini is available for $2.99 on the App Store. It is a separate purchase from the iPad app.
The app was provided by Alphonso Labs for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: iphone news app
