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Pulse turns its mobile newsreader into a beautiful web app

Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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pulse iconPulse Newsreader has been on iOS and Android for a long time and today they’ve released a web app version of their newsreader. This is great news for Pulse fans who want an all encompassing ecosystem for reading customized news feeds. What Pulse does is aggregate all of the types of news you’re interested in like fashion, politics, technology, and many more. Choose at least 3 categories when you join Pulse and the app will give you suggested stories for each category.

News stories are presented in a mosaic or rows of thumbnails, if you wish. You can toggle between the modes on top of the website. News categories show up on the left hand side. Tap on one and you’ll be given a mosaic of news stories and images. You can filter further by publication on the left if you wish. Pulse.me’s interface is smooth and intuitive.

Adding to the usability of Pulse, you can save stories to read later, without the need of third party applications like Instapaper or Pocket. Your reading queue will be save across devices so you can pick up reading on whatever device you’re on. Speaking of sync, all of your news categories are synced automatically between the mobile and web apps. One curious thing to note is that Pulse.me doesn’t currently support logging into Google Reader while its mobile app brethren do. If you configured Google Reader for Pulse from a mobile app, your settings and stories will be synced to Pulse.me. If you create a Pulse account from the website, there is no ability to add Google Reader.

pulse.me mosaic

Users of the Pulse web app will immediately notice how easy things are to read and click on. This is because Pulse has designed this web app to be touch friendly. In their demo video below, you can see that Pulse has designed the web app to work flawlessly on a Windows 8 tablet using Internet Explorer.

I find it a bit strange that Pulse would elect to develop a web app to be used specifically by Internet Explorer as both Firefox and Chrome have much higher market share. In any case, the Pulse web app works fluidly in Windows 8’s touch friendly Internet Explorer. I tried using the Pulse web app on my iPad with Safari and Chrome, but it was too laggy and buggy to function. On the desktop, Pulse.me works great in every browser.

pulse.me save list

Pulse.me is a great addition to the Pulse ecosystem. While Flipboard still remains my favorite news aggregator, I admire Pulse’s ecosystem and wish that Flipboard created a desktop app for reading on my laptop at home. Pulse.me is very much a 1.0 product, which is missing features and is a bit buggy on mobile browsers but its headed in the right direction.

If you don’t have a Pulse account already, you can sign up here.

Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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