Spartan Daily

Pulse flows information into the palm of the hand via its Android and iOS app

Jack Barnwell, Spartan Daily

Very rarely, though, something comes about which does it better than the printed form.

The news aggregator application Pulse is one of these few exceptions.

It gathers hundreds of sources and displays them all in one place in one elegant form — something that simply has not been done well in the time of the web.

Developed by Alphonso Labs in Palo Alto, it is the most useful feed app I’ve ever seen. Feature-laden, well-built and constantly improving, Pulse is one of my favorite smartphone apps ever.

The beauty of this app is that it simplifies the complex beast of the web. Instead of having to sort through dozens of websites to read the news, it lists the articles in an intuitive horizontal list with pictures.

Download and install it on your Android smartphone, iPhone or iPad and follow the instructions to add a preselected pack, such as fun, fashion, games, sports or news, and you’ll get a quality premade list of relevant sources on a selected topic.

The sources are clustered as “pages” and allow for easy organization of topics.

If you want to change the listing on a given page, just hit the “add sources” button and edit the listing for a given page. Just about every website that produces news, including the Spartan Daily, gives a listing of stories that works with apps like this.

This nifty technology, dubbed RSS for “Really Simple Syndication,” has been around for a long time. The hardest part about RSS feeds before apps like this was the lack of a central database of sources.

Instead of having to hunt down the feed address, all you have to type in the name of the site and it’ll appear. Also, if you want only one part of the feed — say, just the Science feed of Wired.com — you can add just the one group of stories.

If you use Google Reader, a web-based aggregator, you can carry over your sources by logging into your Google account and selecting the feeds you wish to bring over. It’s not perfect — those who use Reader concurrently can’t mark seen stories. Even though Android is powered by the Google account, you have to log in separately and authorize Pulse to access your account.

That said, Pulse a great improvement over the standard Google Reader app due to the app’s kinetic interactivity.

The animations don’t distract from the experience — in fact, it’s what makes it a better way to read. Its intuitive nature makes reading blogs, newspapers and magazines fun.

Other cool features that extend this interactivity include playable embedded Flash videos on Android, the ability to view the actual site in the app, the ability to read stories offline, and a dark mode for reading at night.

Pulse also pushes updates to feeds, notifying users when their sources publish stories on the web.

However, it’s not clear how much the process running in the background is contributing to battery usage. To abate this, the interval is adjustable from hourly to daily, a feature common to feed and weather apps that constantly sync in data.

Furthermore, the app allows for syncing across devices via its website, Pulse.me. I use Pulse on my Android phone when on the go and on my iPod touch at home, and it removes stories I’ve already read.

Like a story or want to read it later? Hit the star and it’ll send it to Evernote, Instapaper and Read it Later.

Want to read what your Facebook or Twitter friends are posting? Instead of fussing through individual sites, it also aggregates what your friends posted. You can also read your Facebook wall posts and friend’s status updates.

If you want to do just the opposite — share a story with your Facebook or Twitter friends — there is also direct integration for that.

You could also email or text a friend a short link to the article you’ve read in Pulse. It gives news reading a further dimension of interactivity.

There are hundreds of RSS reading apps and sites, but alas, none do it as well as Pulse.