Pulse is an app for Android, iPhone and iPad that will help you organize and enjoy your favorite news feeds, social networks and other web pages. It does this by collecting the sources you specify and then combining them into a seamless mosaic that is super easy to navigate and aesthetically pleasing. Pulse has many great features, such as multiple view and sync options, sharing abilities, and even news discovery tools, all at no cost.
Having a smartphone has made my life (and many other lives) both much easier and more complicated. We can now access the web on the go, organize our calendars, send and receive files and messages, run thousands of different apps, and oh, yeah, make phone calls too. With all the applications out there, you can find one for nearly anything you can think of, and that means more usage options. More usage options means more complications and complexities, more icons to keep track of, more information sources to organize. Many of these apps cost money (although not much) and can wind up just being one more thing for you to keep track of during your busy day or week. Pulse comes to the rescue, in that case, and helps you manage and organize your favorite pages, news feeds, and social networks, and doesn’t cost a dime.
So how does Pulse do all of this, and why should I want to use it? Well, first of all, Pulse is designed with the average user in mind, while offering advanced options for those who can make use of them. This keeps things both simple and useful, no matter who you are. Those are two great reasons to use it, and when you add the zero price tag, it becomes a no-brainer.
For those of us that use social networking sites, like Facebook or Subjot, Pulse will offer the option to connect to those sites on a regular basis, record the information there and link it to your smartphone for quick and easy access beyond that of loading your browser app, navigating to the page, refreshing for the latest version, and all the other little steps it takes to keep up on a site. While most social networking sites do have a dedicated smartphone app available, if you’re on multiple sites you can find yourself overwhelmed with all the different apps you have to install. Not to mention the amount of storage/memory your smartphone may or may not have. Pulse offers a way of centralizing these sites, in one application, which will save on resources as well as time. Once you’ve installed and entered all your pages into the ‘carousel’ that Pulse uses, you’ll have all of them, and the information on them available from one single location and in a way that is easy to navigate.
Pulse takes all the page and feed information you enter, and combines all of it into a mosaic. A mosaic is a collection of tiles in a specific pattern that is usually artistic in nature. In the case of Pulse it is both artistic and useful, as it makes navigating between and scanning overviews of your favorite sites and feeds very easy and fast. Each page or news feed will show as a single tile in the Pulse mosaic and can be clicked on to expand it to full screen or simply viewed in miniature for important notices. So, as an example, you can have your New York Times, favorite podcasts, Facebook, personal blog, and Time Magazine pages all in the mosaic, all right there just a touch away. It’s like having a mobile periodical library in your pocket combined with the power of a tablet or PC.
In addition to being visually pleasing and technically powerful, Pulse offers a wealth of user options to make your Pulse experience even easier. You can do things like change your view between summary or full page view at a single tap. You can set up all your sources to sync automatically from web to smartphone, and even to other devices all at the same time, and you specify offline sync so you can have them available to read even when you’re not actually connected to the internet. Pulse also will offer you new options for news feeds and other types of publications on a week by week basis so you may discover a new publication that you love, without having to actively search for one. That particular feature can wind up saving you time and lower your risk of eventual carpal tunnel syndrome from typing search strings into various engines.
Of course, any app like Pulse would be deficient if it didn’t pay attention to the big social networking scene, too. Pulse does quite well in that arena and of course offers the ability to easily share any article, page, or site with anyone on your Facebook, Twitter, email, or any other site you want to use. Additionally, Pulse is designed for seamless compatibility with things like Instapaper, Read-It-Later, Evernote, and even Google Reader. Pulse offers all these sharing options with either a single or double tap, so you won’t waste time bouncing from site to site posting the same thing over and over.
These are just a few of the reasons to use Pulse, and just the barest tip of the iceberg when it comes to the value that Pulse offers. This is definitely one of those apps you will want to jump right in with and try out for yourself. After using it for a while myself, I have found that I don’t use any of those standalone apps anymore. If it can go in my Pulse mosaic, that’s where I keep it. I estimate I have already saved at least forty two minutes of my life just by putting all my interests in one place with Pulse, and in the modern age of nanoseconds, time is more valuable than any currency.
Until next time, my friends.
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