Apps That Make Monitoring Your Favorite Websites More Efficient
- The Pulse News App Makes Viewing Content from Multiple Websites Extremely Efficient
- Flipboard Offers Another Newsreader App Alternative
The Internet offers a vast amount of information that’s constantly being updated. Simply staying up-to-date on the latest local and world news, not to mention what’s happening with your friends on Facebook, can easily become a time-consuming task.
For the Apple iPhone or iPad, there are several free apps designed to help you monitor a handful of websites of your choice simultaneously, which will also sort and then present information using a single-screen format.
Using one of these newsreader apps makes it more efficient to browse a handful of websites and news sources simultaneously, and then select only the headlines that are of direct and immediate interest to you, without having to switch between multiple websites or sort through an abundance of Internet clutter (including online ads).
The Pulse News App Makes Viewing Content from Multiple Websites Extremely Efficient
The Pulse News app is a fully customizable newsreader app that allows you to pick and choose from a vast selection of news and special interest websites to monitor. It will also monitor your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts, and present new content in a filmstrip-like format on a single, scrollable screen.
There’s an iPhone and iPad-specific Pulse News app. After installing the appropriate version of the app on your iOS device, you’ll notice it automatically begins monitoring a handful of news websites, including USA Today, on your behalf. Each news source or website has its own horizontal column, made up of individual story-squares.
Scroll left or right along each column to view headlines from that news source or website, or tap on a specific headline to read a news story or article in full (or access related photos, videos, or audio content). Likewise, scroll up or down on the screen to quickly view content from other news sources or websites.
What makes Pulse News a powerful and useful app is that you can fully customize which news sources and websites it monitors, and then select the order that information is displayed in. To begin customizing the app, tap on the gear-shaped icon that’s displayed in the upper-left corner of the main Pulse News screen.
On the left side of the Pulse Setup screen will be listings for each news source the app is currently programmed to monitor. Tap on the “X” icon for any listing to stop the app from monitoring it. Or, to add news sources or websites, tap on the blue-and-white plus sign icon or Add A Page icon.
Upon tapping on the plus-sign icon, you’ll see a comprehensive listing of news sources and other websites, divided up by category. The default category is Featured. It allows you to choose from sites like Fox News, GameSpot, Today.com, AP Entertainment, and USA Today.
However, if you scroll left or right along the top of the source listings, you can choose other subject categories, like Social, Art & Design, Business, Entertainment, Food, Fun & Humor, Lifestyle, News, Politics, Science, Sports, and Technology. Below each category heading are at least a dozen websites or news sources you can have the Pulse News app monitor for you. This can include local, national, international news, industry-oriented news, or content related to a specific topic or subject matter.
For example, if you want to stay current on the latest entertainment news headlines, select the Entertainment category, and then tap on the plus-sign icon associated with the news source listings that are of interest to you, such as The Hollywood Reporter, MTV News, TV Guide, Movieline, Extra, VH1, Paper Magazine, AP Entertainment, and/or OK! Magazine.
Under the Social category, you’ll find listings for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and other online social networking sites that you can further customize by providing your current account information for each respective service.
As you add news sources, listings for them will appear on the left side of the Pulse Setup screen. Using your finger, you can move a listing up or down to give the ones that are of the most interest priority.
You’ll discover that the Pulse News app also allows you to group together websites and news sources by subject matter, and then display those subjects as “Packs” on separate pages, if you desire.
The content displayed by Pulse News utilizes text-based headlines and full-color photos; however, each link can lead to a text-based article, video, photo collection, or audio clip, for example.
By visiting http://www.Pulse.me and setting up a free account, you can set your Pulse content preferences once, and then view that content using Pulse apps on your other iOS, Windows Phone, and Android mobile devices.