Today's News: a slick unofficial iPad app for The Guardian newspaper

When The Guardian newspaper released its Open API, interesting and potentially cool things were bound to happen. Developers love great content and great content loves smart developers.

We’d previously gushed over Today’s Guardian developed by Phil Gyford, a web app that we described as The Guardian newspaper re-imagined for the iPad, even though strictly speaking it wasn’t targeted at Apple’s tablet. But it did bring newspaper reading into the digital age, dispensing with non-linear navigation and other distractions to maintain a coffee-table reading experience.

Well today comes a similar take – in fact directly inspired by the work of Gyford – but this time it is an actual iPad app.

Called “Today’s News”, the free app developed by Singapore web and mobile outfit Deepcalm is available from the iTunes App Store (link) and promises “no unread counts, no blogposts, no video, just the news presented in a beautifully readable way”.

We can’t argue with that.

There’s some nice additions too, such as off-line reading and Instapper support. You can also share articles via email, Twitter and Facebook. In fact in some ways, this appears to be the iPad app that The Guardian newspaper should release itself (I dare say it will soon enough), although that raises an interesting question.

The newspaper currently charges for its official iPhone app and does some nice business along the way. But with Today’s News being free and pretty slick to boot, will The Guardian be tempted to rain in its Open API? Others are making a killing on the iPad after all.