feeds

Pulse News, an elegant mobile reader

Pulse News gives you all the news from your favorite Web sites laid out in an intuitive interface. News sites are laid out vertically so you can swipe up and down to the latest news from all sites quickly, or you can swipe horizontally to read more stories from the same site. Each story heading has the headline and an included graphic, making for a more elegant approach than other news readers that show only text links. Touching a story heading gives you either a text-based summary, a mobile-optimized version for easy reading, or a way to view the story … Read more

A blast from the past

Winamp has been around for ages--it's one of the first media players we remember using--and it's still alive and kicking. Winamp Lite is a scaled-down version of the program, offering the basic character of Winamp with fewer features and in a smaller package. Although we personally find Winamp to be dated and awkward to use, hard-core fans will likely approve of this lightweight version of the software.

Opening Winamp Lite was a blast from the past, as its interface has remained largely unchanged over the years. It's still full of tiny text and buttons with hard-to-read labels. … Read more

How to clean up your Facebook feed

Get in real time. At the top of your News Feed, click "Most Recent." Now you're viewing a real-time view of your friends' activities--however, Facebook is still only showing posts from people who it thinks you interact with most. To change that, click Most Recent > Edit Options > Show posts from all of your friends and pages.

Now you're viewing activities as they happen, which can get a little hectic. Here's how to refine this view:

Hide friends from the feed. Instead of unfriending someone because of his bothersome updates (like, "This chicken … Read more

The 404 789: Where we're desperately clinging to our last peanut (podcast)

Natali Morris is letting go of her peanuts and leaving CNET, but she'll be here until April 29, which means there are only four more Natali Thursdays left! In this edition of The 404, Google is making news with its latest social networking effort, +1; the government is developing a panic button smartphone app; and Reddit users are defending the integrity of the board against link fraud!

The 404 Digest for Episode 789

Single tires are available for sale on Amazon.com. Today is World Data Backup Day--thanks, Reddit! 4chan sends us the Anonymous Bad Guy 404 Augmented Reality app. Uncle Henry shows us The 404 playing on a white iPad 2. Hard Wok Cafe logo mock-ups by Hai Ho and Robin--thanks!

Episode 789 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Take the pulse of the Internet

Pulse News for iPad gives you all the news from your favorite Web sites laid out in an intuitive interface. News sites are laid out vertically so you can swipe up and down to the latest news from all sites quickly, or you can swipe horizontally to read more stories from the same site. Each story heading has the headline and an included graphic, making for a more elegant approach than other news readers that show only text links. Touching a story heading gives you either a text-based summary, a mobile-optimized version for easy reading, or a way to view … Read more

Microsoft turns searches into Web albums

A new Web app from Microsoft can bring life to your Web searches by using them to build customizable news-oriented Web albums.

Demoed at Le Web conference last week, Microsoft's Montage can take virtually any topic or keyword that you enter and create a Web page filled with articles and photographs grabbed from news sites, Twitter, YouTube, and a variety of other sources. You can customize your page with different layouts and change each section of the page to point to specific sources of information. When you're done, you can save your page and publish it or share … Read more

FarmView filter in Chrome

FarmVille is one of the most popular real-time simulation games on the Web and the most popular app on Facebook, with more than 60 million active users worldwide and nearly 25 million Facebook fans. Google's free Chrome browser isn't quite as popular yet, but it's gaining fast, with a growing number of cool extensions. FV Feed Filter is a free Chrome extension that lets you view and filter your FarmVille feeds in the Chrome interface.

We opened Chrome and logged on to Facebook. We then opened a new tab and downloaded and installed FV Feed Filter, which … Read more

Feedly your browser

Feedly is a Google Chrome extension that displays the latest updates from feeds, blogs, and sites like Facebook and Twitter in a magazine-like view. It integrates with Google Reader, Delicious, Amazon.com, YouTube, and other sites. It offers numerous ways to add, filter, display, mark, and share content. It takes a little time to set up Feedly to do exactly what you want it to do, but the end result is like your own personal magazine digest of everything you're interested in, or might be interested in, since Feedly also does a good job of suggesting content.

You must … Read more

Pulse News Reader app now free for iOS, Android

I'll admit it: the App Store is home to so many nifty and inventive news readers (Blogshelf, Early Edition, and TheScore, to name just a few), I never got around to Pulse News Reader.

My mistake. It's not just the coolest blog/feed reader for the iPhone and iPad alike, it's also one of the coolest iOS apps, period. And where it once cost $1.99, Pulse News is now free. (Same goes for the Android version.)

I spent some time fiddling with Pulse News for iPad. (If you're interested in Pulse News Mini for iPhone, … Read more