Between RSS clients and read later apps, Acrylic’s Pulp has always taken a different approach at presenting news beautifully on the Mac and iPad. Combining the traditional aspects of RSS (Pulp lets you add a website’s feed through search, direct OPML, and Google Reader) with the rich visual presentation of apps like Flipboard, Pulp (nèe Times) offers a magazine-like experience for web articles, which can also be stripped out of unwanted graphics through a feature called Magic Reader. In our previous coverage, we were positively impressed by Pulp for Mac’s push sync and Lion support, as well as the iPad version’s elegant layout.
Today, Acrylic is releasing two major updates to Pulp for Mac and iPad, adding an improved interface and Retina graphics on iOS, iCloud sync across platforms, and a new “smart home page” feature that automatically aggregates trends and relevant news items from your feeds.
Retaining the same page-based layout that allows you to add multiple sources in newspaper-like columns with different display options, the new Pulp adds a “Home” start page that features popular and trending articles from your existing feeds. Using a series of algorithms that determine an article’s relevancy through keywords, date, and other feeds mentioning it, the new Home page provides a grid of fresh and popular stories for the day. In actual testing, this meant that with Pulp set to refresh every 5 minutes, the app would look at my four sections (Apple, Technology, Science, Arts & Entertainment) and bring in popular news like the Google/Oracle trial and Jony Ive’s knighthood, sorted by keyword and grouped by sources.
The concept is interesting; I was told by the developers that Pulp builds this “smart home page” completely on the client side of the app – no data is uploaded to Acrylic’s servers and social networks aren’t contacted to aggregate popular links, either. I haven’t been able to test Pulp’s algorithm during a major news break, but I believe it is safe to assume it would grab popular stories within a couple of minutes. Overall, I think the new Home page is a good idea as it provides a simple and efficient way to “see what’s important” without navigating through feeds manually; in my tests, I noticed refreshing trends took slightly longer on the iPad version of Pulp – but the results were the same afterwards.
The big new feature of Pulp 2.5 is iCloud sync. Moving from the previous Pulp Sync service, iCloud will automatically keep feeds, pages, and shelf items in sync across the iPad and Mac. For testing purposes, I updated to Pulp 2.5 on the Mac, configured my virtual newspaper, and saved a couple of items to the app’s shelf using the new browser extension. Once I updated to the new 1.5 version on the iPad, the first launch of the app made me wait around 30 seconds for an automatic import of my data, and I couldn’t experience any errors of sort. iCloud sync has been fast and reliable in my tests, with Pulp deleting and adding sources between the iPad and Mac app within seconds. The addition of synced shelf items is welcome, too, as it offers a simple way to save articles “for later” – albeit the app also comes with direct integration for Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability.
Pulp 1.5 for iPad and Pulp 2.5 for Mac are two gorgeous, solid, and clever updates. Pulp has always wanted to provide a solution in between the fast-paced nature of RSS and the laid-back reading experience of magazines, and the new version builds on that foundation, enhancing it with iCloud sync and a useful, constantly up-to-date Home page.
Pulp for iPad is available at $2.99 on the App Store; Pulp for Mac is $4.99 on the Mac App Store.
