I am a creature of habit. I have my morning routine. I get up at about 4:30am, I get up, and before I go run in the mornings, I read the news. Most of my recent blog posts and twitter updates are done during this magic hour before exercise.
I also love news aggregators, they allow me to customize the news the way I want to read it. I’m not forced to listen or watch content as specifically provided by a single news source.
If you use the iPhone or iPad my favorite among these is a little app called Pulse. It’s now offered for free on the app store but it was really worth the few bucks I initially paid for the thing. I use Reeder for the IPhone and Outlook on my desktop, and plenty of other news aggregators, but Pulse is my favorite.
Pulse, developed but 22 and 23 year old Stanford students, Ahkay Kothari and Anit Gupta is simply a joy to use. Unlike other news readers Pulse provides a flowing headline experience with thumbnails from the news source.
It’s what I would call a quality over quantity approach. Many news readers allow for almost unlimited news feeds in a list or headline approach to display, that’s ok, but for me specifically I monitor about a dozen important news sources on a daily basis (I’ll post on my choices for news in another post but in short they include local, national, technology, security, and productivity categories). There are others I touch but I have the critical few that I keep an eye on.
Pulse is what I was hoping Blancspot would be. I purchased Blancspot from the app store and have used it maybe twice, while it has a similar experience Pulse has, the sources in Blancspot are fixed and there’s no real means of modifying the stream, many of the articles in Blanspot are stale and not refreshed. Blancspot is very much a get what thy give you. I just can’t recommend it.
Pulse makes monitoring these sources both natural and easy to browse. Pulses strength can, for some, also be it’s weakness. Pulse limits the number of sources to 20, so if you are a quantity type person, pulse may not be for you. Also, Pulse, because of it’s layout, with thumbnails, displays headlines 9 (in portrait) or 10 (in landscape) at a time. But if keep an eye on a few critical sources, Pulse might just be the news aggregator for you.
Pulse is free with in app ads, and is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.