A while ago Pulse, an RSS reader for the iPad, made a huge splash (mentioned at Stevenote, then pulled from the store on legal issues with NYT, and then back in the store). I refrained from reviewing it because I couldn’t recommend it as a usable reader. Not until today’s update at least.

Pulse is a beautiful reader with a splendid interface to directly interact with your news. It’s limited to 20 feeds at the moment, but to me that was more than enough. Pulse isn’t meant for processing your news feeds; you will fail at going through every article of every site you follow. Pulse is designed to help you focus your attention on the most important articles of the 10-20 odd sites that you often like to have a look at. Each article is defined by its first image, and you have about 20 articles per feed to peruse through.

There are no unread counts. How happy am I to find so many readers forgoing the evil RSS counts that have plagued my life all these years. With no counts, there’s nothing compelling me to go through every article. While Pulse features Google Reader integration, you can only use it to import feeds, and not sync. This goes well with the vision of its developers at Alphonso Labs, or so says Akshay Kothari:

The app was inspired by a personal frustration at the whole news reading experience on mobile devices. Either you had to open multiple browser windows or tabs to browse news stories, or you had set up an inbox-looking rss reader. Pulse provides the flexibility of choosing your news sources, but enables a visual interaction with your news. Out goes the text clutter, in comes a dynamic mosaic of pictures.

Pulse features some clean typography. Once the font has been bumped up to a respectable size, things are extremely readable. Moreover, since the app doesn’t use the standard two column layout, you get the full thumbnail view even in portrait. The Alphonso labs team has managed to cook up some real nice UI workflows. If you want to view more articles from the current feed, merely pull up the feed tab and browse through thumbnails at the bottom of your screen. It’s slower than using the next/previous buttons found in most RSS readers, but this way you don’t have to go through every article in the current feed. The latest version caches all your feeds so you can use the app without any internet access, and has the ability to send articles to Instapaper, along with twitter and facebook.

There are some things about Pulse that need to be improved; performance being the big one. While the 1.1 release did considerably speed things up, they’re still nowhere near what we’re used to on the iPad. Even simple tasks like adding a feed results in a certain amount of lag. Also, as pretty as the app may be, there are some weird UI issues throughout the app. The presence of two home buttons, looking totally different but meaning the same thing. Then we have some login forms with the cancel button on the left, login on the right; other forms show them inverse. Not the biggest of issues, but it’s still a step away from perfection.

Many have asked what we think is the best RSS reader on the iPad. I don’t think there will ever be just one way to experience RSS on the iPad. Reeder ($4.99) is one stupendously well designed reader, but its UI is designed to manage a large amount of feeds—go get it if you haven’t already. And while it excels at doing that, it does not in any way emphasize those feeds that mean more to your reading habits. That’s where Pulse steps in. I don’t need to look at every site when I wake up, or need to see the big news of the day. Most importantly, if I don’t launch Pulse for a day, or even a week, there’s no unread counter making me feel guilty about missing out. In many ways, this is like The Early Edition ($4.99) by Glasshouse Apps. But where The Early Edition tries to do too much (it’s newspaper like novelty wears off soon), Pulse’s narrow focus wins out at the task it’s meant to perform.

If you want to put Pulse to the the task your previous RSS reader performed, it will fail. However, if you’re fed up with looking at unread counts, managing hundreds of feeds, and want to just sit back and read your news, Pulse is a splendid app for just $3.99.