Pulse was one of the first apps I downloaded while setting up my iPad 2. This app and with its dual vertical and horizontal scrolling literally made my jaw drop when I first saw the videos last year. After all, thumbnails of articles are much cooler than just seeing plain text headlines scroll by you…right?
I’m not seeing stars
You can use Pulse to read all sorts of websites in a cool horizontal stream of posts. The app provides its own list of suggested sources, but also allows you to add your Google Reader subscriptions. I opted to go for the latter and organized my Reader subs into a set of five tabs (Apple, Apple devs, etc.) but then quickly ran into a very sad problem: although Pulse can import from and even sync read counts with Google Reader, it can’t star any items. Pulse can send articles to Instapaper, but oh my stars, there are no stars. This is a big strike against the app for me, as stars are my primary way of saving content within RSS for later reading or posting.
No hiding what you’ve read
Another flaw in the Pulse experience is the inability to hide the posts that you’ve already read. Most every other reader I know of will let you hide read content, and so while I can understand why Pulse shies away from unread counts that make catching up feel more like a duty than a pleasure, showing every post in a blog at all times just doesn’t do me any good. Some of the blogs I subscribe to only update every few weeks, and in the mean time they take up all sorts of space in Pulse by showing me a list of posts I read weeks or months ago.
I tried to approach Pulse with an open mind, but I’m now walking away with clenched fists (being ever so slightly melodramatic here). Pulse looks just as sleek on the iPad as the promo videos would imply, but the actual experience of trying to read in the app just feels stale. The idea of a pulse connotes a constant movement, but this stagnant treatment of material I’ve already read is just no good to me.
Continue reading:
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