iPad App Review: Early Edition v1.0

One of the first things I did when I got my new iPad was to look for a good RSS reader, i stumbled across Early Edition. When I first opened the application and started playing around with it I just loved it. I was able to start it up and add a few of my feeds that I read on a daily basis. I had originally added only 14 feeds thinking this was going to be a good set of feeds for my daily news. However today when I opened up the application I was confronted with only 4 articles to read, no matter how many times I told Early Edition to refresh the feeds nothing seemed to happen. My first thought was this is a bug and I added a review to the apple store flaming the application for not working. I jumped the gun because I saw reviews from a lot of other people about the same issue and though how could Apple let an application that does not work like this get into the application catalog. After looking at it for a few minutes I determined that I just did not have enough source feeds added to Early Edition because there were only 4 new articles for today at that point. I quickly edited my review to give it a 5 star rating after adding more feeds and seeing this issue go away.

Now lets actually get meat of what this application is all about. Early Edition gives you a newspaper friendly way of reading your rss feeds. All of the articles are nicely laid out in a newspaper fashion as a lot of people are used to reading traditional newspapers. This gives the application a nice feel. You can skim the headlines and if something peaks your interest you can easily tap the header title to see the article in Story Mode. One thing that I have noticed is that when you are reading an article in the Store Mode it does not always contain the entire article. The developers have added a button at the top of the Story Mode view which allows you to view the article in View Original mode. This is very nice as it loads the article in the same window even though it contains all of the mark-up that the website uses. I am assuming they are using a Web View to gain this functionality but it really does beat opening the original in Safari. I have to add that I like how the developers made it so that you can swipe from either side of the screen to the other to change pages. It is a very nice visual touch to actually see the pages curl and fold over.

Above I have posted a few screen shots of some of the views that you can get in Early Edition. Up until this point everything has been excellent and I wish that I did not have anything negative to say about this application. However there are a few drawbacks to using this application. First of all when you open the application it starts to reload the feeds, if you have a lot of them this will take a few minutes. While this is expected behavior because it needs to check for new content what is not expected is that your UI will lock up until it has completed refreshing the feeds. I also think it is a bit on the slow side while refreshing the feeds. My old feed reader refreshed quite a bit faster so it seems.

The final drawback that I have found is how it displays the feeds. It seems to me like it does not do any randomization of the feeds before displaying them so you will see several articles from the same feed source near each other and might have to go a few pages to get to a different source. This happened to me this morning with TUAW. I hope that they do something to rectify this in a future version, or at-least provide an option for it.

Even with these few drawbacks I have not regretted paying the $4.99 for the application. I use it every day and have been loving it, it just makes keeping up with my news easy and rather enjoyable. Have you tried Early Edition? What are your thoughts on the application and what was your experience like? Please let me know in the comments below.