Last May, we noted that Pulse was a “must-have news app for the iPad.” A few weeks later, no less than Apple CEO Steve Jobs agreed, showing it off on stage at an Apple event. Then the app got pulled over a content dispute. Then it reappeared. Then a competitor with big-time backing appeared, Flipboard. It’s been a crazy ride for the two Stanford grads who built Pulse. And now they’re back on the offensive with Pulse 2.0.
The latest version released into the App Store today brings a big list of improvements. The key ones:
- Source-O-Plenty: Now get 60 sources across 5 pages (12 on each page). Yes, that’s a full 3x our last release.
- Organize away: We’ve completely redesigned the source management to make it really, really, really easy. When you take the number of feeds to 60, this becomes a bit challenging, but we hope that you are able to organize it easily. Just press the wheel at the top-left, and experience the power! Do give us feedback on how to improve.
- Pulse Bazaar: Discover new and interesting sources in our own Bazaar. People get thrilled when they find a source that they didn’t know about. Pulse Bazaar is a step in that direction.
- Zip Zip Zip: Performance enhancements to make your favorite application faster than ever.
The $1.99 app remains an awesome visual way to consume news, now it’s just more robust and faster to use. While it definitely competes with Flipboard, the two go about things a bit differently since Pulse is more straight-up RSS, whereas Flipboard is tied to social sharing. People still seem fairly divided over which is better.
And soon there will be Qwiki for iPad.
To be clear, Pulse 2.0 is iPad-only for now — but the team promises to get it out for the iPhone and Android in the next couple of weeks as well.
You can find Pulse in the App Store here.
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