The Tyee free smartphone app was plugged today by a leading trade-publication for Canadian magazines.

In a Canadian Magazines blogpost, The Tyee's free app made the short-list of "Three Useful Apps for the Publishing Industry."

Canadian Magazines is the bilingual print publication and blog of Magazines Canada, a national trade association for Canadian-owned magazines.

"The app is an aggregate of the magazine's latest news stories," explains Chantal Sweeting, a coordinator of advertising services at Magazines Canada and writer of the blogpost.

Sweeting goes on to mention that the app, produced by Phillip Smith and Greg Heo, is constructed with a source code that is entirely open source. In practice this means that aspiring smartphone application producers are free to use The Tyee app as a template for their own applications.

"This sounds like a great option for smaller publishers looking to save money when producing an app," writes Sweeting, an assertion confirmed by sources inside The Tyee.

Instructions on how to put The Tyee's free app on your smartphone can be found here.

Ben Christopher reports for The Tyee.