Pulse posts

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.

Update: Pulse is now back on the App Store, presumably after the necessary changes to de-emphasize the NYT and Boston Globe content that had ruffled feathers.

The Pulse News Reader for iPad, which we recently reviewed and gave away, has been pulled from the App Store despite praise from Steve Jobs at yesterday's WWDC keynote.The reason? According to Kara Swisher at All Things D, The New York Times complained that "...the application named 'Pulse News Reader' infringes The New York Times Company's rights."

The real irony is that the Times wrote up the app just last week, calling it "...a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator" while profiling developers Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta. Why the change of heart? It seems that the Times did not want its content displayed in the app. Oddly enough, Pulse was pulling NYT content from publicly-available RSS feeds. But it isn't just that it's pulling the feed. From the NYT's lawyer, Richard Samson:

"The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds...the app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use." Since the app comes with the Times feed pre-loaded, and features images of Times content inside promotional material, Samson argues that Pulse is making money off of their content.

Kothari and Gupta plan to adjust the app and get it back in the store. As for their relationship with Apple, there's no hard feelings. "I don't blame Apple, because they have to respond when contacted by lawyers from the Times," said Akshay Kothari.

We'll keep an eye out for a revised version of the app. Good luck to Kothari and Gupta.

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.

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]