So, apropos my issues with the Pulse Reader app I’ve been having, I decided to start looking into other possibilities. Really, this is the biggest problem any product- when things have degraded to the point where a customer decides to look elsewhere for solutions.
I’ve known about Tatptu and even tried it, but ultimately didn’t like it. The interface was similar, but different from Pulse in the wrong way for me. Plus, it seemed to have difficulties updating the various feeds I like to read.
As it turns out, a friend had shown me a slick little app called Flipboard and it just so happens to be available on the Barnes & Noble App Store. The interface was very different from Pulse, but still very intuitive. It also has a large selection of feeds and categories and also has some topical categories where multiple feeds are presented in through a single “board.”
The interface itself consists of a grid of tiles with the various feeds, be they RSS, Twitter or other. If there are enough feeds, then there will be multiple pages of these tiled layouts. To move through them, simply swipe like a book and the current page “flips” to the next one presenting the next set of feeds.
When a feed is selected, say National Geographic for instance, a summary view of the articles from the feed are then presented in a variety of layouts that can be paged through with the swiping and flipping. Touching an article allows for reading it. To exit from reading an article, simply use a two-finger touch and the interface returns to the summary view of articles.
In all, it’s a pleasant experience and, near as I can tell anyway, the program is very stable. I’ve yet to crash it in normal usage.
There are several other niceties which I’ve yet to take advantage of like “Read Later” services, the ability to filter out certain authors and a few other things. For those of you using Google Reader, there’s a way to configure it to access your Google Reader account and present that as a channel. It also can serve as a Twitter client, simply enter your Twitter account info and then your Twitter timeline will be presented just like any other feed; thus, potentially eliminating the need for a dedicated Twitter client. It also supports Facebook news feeds and status. Nice.
Another nice feature is the “Cover Story” feed which appears to present a sampling of the latest musings from all of configured feeds. Thus, it creates a quick way to see if there’s anything of interest. Looking into the help a bit, this appears to be some kind of “learning” feed that picks out thing you might like based on the articles you choose to read.
The hardest part, by far, is the setup. The builtin search for feeds is pretty good as long as they are of the mainstream variety. Unfortunately, I had a few favorites that just could not be found. Fortunately, it’s possible for Flipboard to find them by providing a full URL for the feed. Thus, I spent some time finding the RSS feeds with a browser, copying them to the clipboard, then pasting them into the Flipboard search.
Initially, my only hang-up was with some of the built-in feed search results- they seemed to get stuck and wouldn’t present updated information. Once I provided my own URL’s for those feeds, those problems went away. The only other complaint is that not all of the articles are presented in strict chronological fashion. The designers say that because they take article presentation issues into account. That said, I haven’t seen anything too egregious to complain about, nothing like articles from months ago being presented at the beginning of a feed.
All of the expected “social” functions appear to be available, though aside from configuring my Twitter timeline, I haven’t made use of them as yet.
So, in summary we’ve got a program that can be configured to present the information I’m interested in using an attractive presentation template with an intuitive UI. Configuration was the only PITA, but that’s a one time thing and gets easier as I become familiar with it. Plus, most importantly, it doesn’t crash during normal usage. I’ve found myself using it more and more and Pulse less and less as my confidence grows that I’m getting the most recent stuff.