Well, this is just a whole bag of good. The Guardian have launched an app for the iPhone, and it feels like a real step towards those personalised newspapers futurologists have always dreamed about.
The app costs £2.39 to buy, launches fairly speedily, and lets you tailor the bits of the paper / site you want to read. The home page opens with a Latest section, which shows your choice of up to six filtered areas (we've chosen Top Stories, Culture, Features, Technology, UK News and Film - you select them using the settings icon at the top right of the screen) and a Trending section (as per Twitter).
There's a shortcut menu at the bottom of the screen, which you can also personalise. The Favourites page (below, far left) lets you choose more sections to keep an eye on, and you can add in your favourite columnists too.
Following the Art & Design section (below) as an example, you jump through to a page showing Editors Picks, Galleries, Features, Popular, and Audio (they've not got video on the app yet). Clicking on an individual story takes you through to its page, which is set at a fairly comfortable text size (you can increase it and decrease it if you're wildly long or short sighted), though the leading is perhaps just a tad tight? You can bookmark the story, and email it / facebook it using the Send icon at the bottom left of the page. You can also download content to read later on the tube / plane / beach.
There are areas they've not included in this 1.0 version, including hyperlinks, commenting and video; and it's iPhone only for the time being, though they're working on rolling it out to other mobile operating systems. It's also UK only for now, apparently due to some complex EU tax rules. Check out the full FAQs.
We're loving it - total future goodness. Pick it up from iTunes.
(And heck, while you're there, check out the Google search app - the voice activated search function is super shiny.)