A Fry Paper

"Your Royal Highness, Your Grace, My Lord Bishop, Your Excellencies, Honoured President, Academicians, Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen, artists, art lovers, friends, trustees, donors, distinguished guests and assorted media scum."

Typical Fry! I was pleasantly surprised by a new iPad app created by one of my faves British comedians of the better sort. Stephen Fry. We have seen him in Black Adder, Fry and Laurie (yep, that's House MD to the rest of you), and recently on a tour documentary across the US, starting in New England and ending in Hawaii. The above opening of his speech was given in a recent event two weeks ago, at a Dinner for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Fry has good connections with Apple (he knows Johnny Ive, he sez) and he even met His Jobness recently. The model of his app is very much identical to one of the first apps demoed, namely the NYT Editor's choice. Fry did the inevitable thing like we'll see so many others do in the near future. He brought into the iPad a targeted view of his brilliant blog as a case study of iPad enabled curated computing. Fun to read other than he omitted some accessibility facilities, like text enlargement and copy/paste ability. I had to go to the same article (speech) in his blog to copy his speech opening statement...

Nevertheless, Fry's got the whole 'curated' paradigm just right. See what he writes in his "No Comments" blogpost:

"...You may, rightly, think that this FryPaper app is rather simple and unexciting. Indeed it is. There are the device, the content and you and we are not very interested in clouding the interaction between the three. We might add this bell or that whistle from time to time and as occasion and opportunity might suggest, but for the moment we are happy to offer this as no more than a little something. If the mood strikes me to blog, microblog or blessay the app can suck that content from the site and let you know that it has done so and you can read it in an iPaddy sort of way. That is all there is to it..."

A Fry detail... In the few secs necessary to load his homepage inside his app, instead of displaying the usual "Loading" next to the spinning wheel, Fry displays "just clearing my throat...". You get the idea...

Very nice gig, Mr. Fry! I pray other famous bloggers follow your lead.