Call me old-fashioned (or just old--I can take it), but there’s something about the look of a newspaper that just feels right when it comes to taking in the news of the day. Problem is, newspapers today bring you the news of yesterday and sometimes the day before that. RSS feeds are the answer, I know, but something in me dies at the thought of reading even more words in an email-like interface.

If you’re with me this far, you’ll understand why I instantly fell in love with The Early Edition for iPad. This $4.99 app from Glasshouse Apps beautifully sucks in your RSS feeds and displays them as a gorgeous newspaper complete with photos and links to the full website versions. You can scroll within stories on your Early Edition page, and if you have a ton of feeds, the app builds you a multi-page newspaper. Each day’s news is gathered, and yesterday’s news is archived.

There is a catch, but it’s a 1.0 kinda catch--v1.1 of Early Edition will obliterate the catch, its devs insist. That said, there’s no freakin’ way to add feeds other than copy/pasting URLs from Safari or typing them in manually! I put my two or three most-used feeds in, then got cranky and bailed.

As it stands today, Early Edition is gorgeous but not very usable. Fortunately, the devs plan to submit 1.1 to Apple within two weeks of this writing, and that new version will add hugely necessary features: Google Reader integration, OPML import, feed discovery, and groups. It’ll be, like, an actual real-life RSS reader, and we genuinely cannot wait for that day.

In the interim, Early Edition is, again, awfully pretty, and we open it every day or two to desultorily poke at features like emailing stories, sending them off to Instapaper or Safari, and the nifty archives of our past “newspapers.” It’s a great example of both the huge potential of the iPad and the hot rush in which devs raced to post their apps before they were, yknow, finished. And who can blame them? Thar be gold there, after all.

When 1.1 hits, we’ll post a full review of this promising app.