I lived in England for five years. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with a man they call a “national treasure” – Stephen Fry. I already knew who he was from watching Jeeves and Wooster, the PG Wodehouse series on PBS. Fry played Jeeves, the clever valet always saving the day for Hugh Lauries’ affable and aristocratic but perhaps not so clever Bertie Wooster. If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend putting the kettle on and settling in for a nice long stretch of carefree telly, especially if you like your characters with names like Gussie Fink-Nottle, Biffy Biffen, and Sir Reverend Spode. Right-ho! (Rumor has it that Fry and Laurie are reuniting again for some kind of comedy mischief – I can hardly wait!)
Comedy is just one example of Fry’s many talents. Over the years he has written novels, performed on stage & screen, hosted popular television quiz shows and radio programs, and created documentaries. He truly has the most gorgeous brain. And he embraces technology – being a devoted fan of Apple (although he recently praised Windows phone 7) and an avid Twitterer (@stephenfry). So it’s no real surprise that Fry has written an autobiography to tell us all about his life’s adventures, The Fry Chronicles. But he has also created something most exciting and unusual that might revolutionize the way we consume information. He has created the myFry mobile app which tells his life story not from beginning to end but from every angle imaginable.
According to WIRED magazine’s Gadget Lab: ”myFry provides both the metadata and interface necessary to read the book nonlinearly — a synthesis of the familiar (flipping through the pages, jumping to any point one likes, not just a chapter head) and the new (sorting data by content tags rather than chapter titles or page numbers; following associative rather than sequential threads).”
I like to read traditional books and have not evolved to the e-book or iPad YET – but it’s nice to know that people like Fry are pushing the boundaries to change what we think of as a book to more of a “reading experience”.
It might not be appropriate for everything, but why not use a color-coded index app to find information quickly in your employee directory, for example, or product catalogue – or a mobilized knowledgebase? Delightful idea indeed … Jeeves would approve! Have any others for me?
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Tags: iPhone, Mobile Apps, Mobile Masters - General, Terri White, The Mobile Beat
