Bringing back the anti-algorithm news reader.

Once upon a time, there was an app called Pulse. It was the - best - news - reader - ever. Along came a big bad wolf, for the sake of the story, we'll just call him LinkedIn. LinkedIn bought Pulse, completely changed the UI and aggregated LinkedIn content.

Shocking, but this story is actually true! Pulse was easily my most used daily app for years. In my opinion, it was the best balance of pure efficiency and UX, as far as news readers go. It’s grid based aggregation allowed you to quickly traverse self-curated sources and was excellent at allowing you to “snipe” content while understanding trends not through recomendation algorithms, but being able to see all the news and allowing your natural human pattern recognition to come to it’s own conclusions.

In a sense, it was the anti-recommendation news aggregation experience.

If you read the reviews on the app store for the post-Linkedin Pulse, the story tells itself of how to abandon your user base by prioritizing business outcomes over people’s intent.

Original? Not at all. Needed? OH YES!

A good engineer friend and I built Gulp on nights and weekends over 4 months (insane to think I can now build it in a weekend alone). We both used the opportunity to learn more about React Native. I handled the design, product strategy and React Native view layer “styles” while my partner handled everything else. We launched on the app store on October 1, 2016. You can see the fruit of our labor below.