April 3, 2013
Next up on our Reader Replacement Rendezvous?
Pulse.
Pulse seems decent — a free news aggregation/RSS site. I’m not terribly fond of the way it categorizes things into newspaper-like sections (News, Sports, Technology, Style, et cetera), nor am I entirely clear on how to re-organize things in a manner I’d like. That said, it’s easy to navigate and read, on both my PC and mobile, so here we go …
Offline support
We’re now checking this first, since it seems to be the hurdle where everybody falls down. Does Pulse do offline support?
Yes.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Now, it’s not perfect — it seems that images, other than thumbnails, are not downloaded. And the app has managed to eat 1.77 GB of 3G data over 48 hours (compared to < 0.5 GB used by my current reader, over the last 30 days, which does offline support including all images in the post). But the text is there. THE TEXT IS THERE! I can actually read things.
Of course, not things about photography, or most humour blogs (which tend to be photo-heavy) or anything with important graphics. But given that this is light years ahead of everything else I’ve tried, I will say thank you, pulse.
Importing Google Reader Settings
While having something functional is a wonderful step in the right direction, I follow a lot of things on Google Reader today. And while starting over from scratch seems well and good, it’s also probably just a big pain in the ass; after all, I have not once been tempted to unsubscribe to every single RSS feed and start over again.
Luckily, pulse has a dead simple importer. Couldn’t be easier.
Of course, much like offline mode, this isn’t perfect. It pulls in all your feeds, but doesn’t distinguish between read and unread posts … so everything is unread.
That blog that was taken down in 2010, and is now well forgotten? Well, you never unfollowed it, sir. So all those posts are sitting there to be read again.
Additionally, pulse sorts your RSS feeds from Reader into categories. But not useful ones. They are Uncategorized, Uncategorized 1, et cetera. It’s up to you to reorganize them into something useful.
How?
Beats me. The only way I can find to move something from one category to another is to delete it from the first category, and add it to the second.
This, of course, is pretty damn useless. It would seem simpler to print out a list of blogs I subscribe to, and add them in Pulse myself. I would avoid the whole zombie-blog problem that way, too.
Adding new feeds
Another key element to an RSS feeder is adding new content, and removing old.
Removing a source is dead simple — click the X. Confirm.
Adding a source is more complicated.
Pulse is clearly imagined as a news aggregation tool. So it defaults to the giant blogs (BoingBoing, Buzzfeed) and traditional news sources (BBC, AP). These are simple to add.
RSS feeds are supported, but clearly an afterthought. There’s a search box, and it seems to find things pretty well, but it feels like it could be a little bit hit and miss.
The final verdict
Pulse seems the same across the board: Functional, but flawed.
It does everything that I want of an RSS reader, but there are flaws in every aspect — whether it’s the organisation of content, the offline support, the data usage, or adding content.
That said, it moves ahead of Feedly today, into the pole position. Ticking all the boxes, however poorly, is better than missing some.
But I am very much hoping it doesn’t stay in top spot.