Elegant Pulse News Reader Takes On The App Store

The iPad makes for a great reader and skimming through RSS feeds on a sofa is probably one of the device's most interesting uses so far. A great app for that, and my personal favorite, has always been NetNewsWire, but it's being challenged today by an interesting newcomer; Pulse.

Created by two Stanford graduates, Pulse is, in short, an attractively packaged RSS aggregator. Instead of the traditional list of posts, feeds are displayed as a mosaic and you navigate through them by swiping the screen. Posts can be opened in either a text-only format, similar to Instapaper Mobilizer, or directly in a Webview. You can then share posts via Twitter, Facebook and email.

While Pulse is based on RSS feeds and syncs with your Google Reader account, it's trying to be more user friendly by letting you add sources with a search function. What it seems to actually be doing is picking up RSS feeds with a Google search. It has its advantages. For example, you can add many feeds easily (including Twitter), on the downside however you might not find all your sources this way (i.e. AppAdvice at the moment).

Pulse's layout is very fresh and appealing, it looks like what you would expect on a tablet, but it comes with some serious downsides that might turn you off. It's limited to 20 different feeds, it doesn't really let you keep track of what you read already and the text viewer doesn't support video. It also seems the only way to fetch new posts is a restart and some posts will still be delayed. You also won't be able to fetch older posts.

If you're just a light user with a couple of feeds and want them to look good, Pulse will be perfect for you. If, on the other hand, you're a power user you'll be quickly going back to your old aggregator. As for pricing, it goes for $3.99, which is actually fair in this category considering the design effort.

Here is how it looks like on video: