Pulse has been one of the iTunes App Store premier news readers for the past couple of years. The mobile application started its life on the iPad, a device that is reinventing mobile news consumption, and then it was soon re-built for the iPhone, iPod touch, and Android devices.
While iOS device hardware is optimized for convenient news reading, the hardware requires great software to truly create a great news reading experience. Pulse has always fulfilled that with its wonderful and graphical tile-based interface. Users are able to slide their news stories and organize news sources conveniently.
The experience on iOS and Android touchscreen devices has been well-received but Pulse users have been asking for a version of Pulse for computers.
Pulse has come up with a great solution that is not exclusive like a downloadable app. Instead, it is a fully featured web application. Read on for all of the details:
Pulse’s famed tile interface for news articles comes from the mobile device to the web. Since many computer users have different monitor and browser window sizes, the web user interface will automatically and dynamically adjust for the best experience.
Pulse’s mobile applications have a slew of content partnerships and the ability to add news from a variety of sources such as websites in categories of technology, general world news, science, lifestyle, business, sports, entertainment, food, fun and humor, politics, and art and design.
Since many Pulse for web users will be using the website as an extension of the mobile apps they already use, user preferences and content between mobile and desktop will automatically sync. Pulse has long allowed users to sign up for a Pulse.me account, which already worked to sync information between apps for users with multiple mobile devices.
In our tests, text clarity and rendering is great and easy to read, and quickly flipping between articles is easy and swift with dedicated buttons on the top right of the individual article reading interface. For those running on computers with ultra-high resolution displays (like the recently released MacBook Pro with Retina display), text and all website graphics also look perfect, not fuzzy. Users can also choose between a light or dark reading background for stories, and users can also choose between different font styles and sizes.
Users are able to view all of their news sources and articles as categories, or users are able to focus completely on a single website.
Social sharing is also emphasized with a bar within each article present that is dedicated to sharing content. Users are able to share articles via Twitter, Facebook, and email. Also, articles can be favorited.
We’ve been using Pulse’s new website for almost a couple of weeks now, and it is a fantastic way to read news on a computer. The experience closely mirrors that great one on iOS, and the synchronization through a Pulse account is a great feature.
While this does not affect Mac users, a very interesting thing to note is that this new Pulse website is built to fully support touch in the browser on touchscreen Windows 8 devices. Pulse worked in collaboration with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team on this, and this shows how advanced modern web applications can be.
The web app runs in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome on the Mac, in addition to those browsers and Internet Explorer on Windows PCs.
Pulse’s new web application is live at www.pulse.me.
