Pulse News Reader For iPad Praised By Jobs Then Yanked From App Store

It's every young developers' dream: you create an app for the iPad, get glowing feedback in the press, and then Steve Jobs mentions your software while standing on stage during the WWDC 2010 keynote.  Unfortunately for the developers of the Pulse News Reader app which Jobs did indeed namecheck yesterday, the aftermath wasn't chart-topping sales but a takedown notice from the NY Times and their software being yanked unceremoniously from the App Store.

The Pulse News Reader takes up to twenty news feeds and presents them in a slick, easily read manner, complete with both "as online" views and a cut-down version with ads and banners stripped out, similar in fact to Safari 5's Reader functionality.  It seems it's this slick presentation of other sites' RSS feeds that the NY Times disagrees with; according to the paper's lawyer, that infringes on their copyright.

Apple responded to the legal request – which you can read over at All Things D – by pulling Pulse from the App Store.  It's unclear where developers Alphonso Labs will go from here, though a start might be removing the NY Times from their screenshots; apparently the lawyers also reckon that's using the paper's good name to promote the software.