Four months ago, in my review of The Early Edition for iPad:

The concept behind The Early Edition is simple and effective: it’s up to you to build your personal newspaper, which unlike every RSS application out there doesn’t just give you a list of the latest news on the Internet. It really resembles a real newspaper, with titles, subtitles, summaries, pages and the layout you’d expect from a paper edition. The app comes with a set of built-in sources (ranging from Politics and Business to Technology and Apple) but you can specify the websites you want to read by importing feeds from Google Reader, single sources and OPML files.

The app hasn’t changed much since then, but it’s going to be a lot better soon. The Glasshouse Apps developers have been working hard on making The Early Edition a reading app capable of staying up to the game stepped up by Flipboard and Pulse, even though The Early Edition came out first. There’s no doubt Flipboard changed the landscape of reading apps on the iPad, and users’ expectations as well.

The Early Edition 1.3 will bring more social sharing options with Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Read It Later support, plus a new option to view articles through the Instapaper Mobilizer, a service that will render websites through the Instapaper engine without adding them to your reading queue.

Following the trend of several other reading apps for iPad and Apple itself, Glasshouse Apps has also implemented new multitouch gestures: pinch to close articles, swipe to navigate, tap & hold to load a single website as an “isolated fetch” (sounds great) and two-finger swipe to quickly switch from text view to web view. The app will feature improved settings, iOS 4.2 compatibility and a backup functionality as well.

I’m looking forward to trying this new version of The Early Edition, currently in review by Apple. Check out the promo video below.