This article is about the application. For the reference work it is routinely mistaken for, consult your nearest bookshop.
An Encyclopaedia With Opinions
The Guide to Everything (home-screen name: The Guide, the screen being small) is an application for the iPhone that takes an article of Wikipedia and retells it in the voice of a contributing editor: dry, British, and mildly aggrieved on the subject’s behalf. The facts are Wikipedia’s. The tone is the editor’s. Each entry says, in small type at its foot, who wrote it, and where the author was a machine it says so, in the manner of a form that has been filled in honestly and regrets it. A reader who prefers the original may have the original. A setting is provided. No one is asked why.
It claims to contain everything. The claim has not been tested and has not been withdrawn.
Operating the Dock
There is no home screen in the usual sense; the dock is the home screen. It holds eight tabs (Guide, Random, Don’t Panic, Nearby, Saved, Useless Info, Search and Settings), each of which opens, in place, into a column of further tabs, and those into others, until the reader arrives at an article. The route taken is kept along the top as a trail of coloured pills, so that the way back is never in doubt. The pills may be pressed. Several have been, on purpose.
In Case of Emergency
The same tab is the one that carries the instruction its name suggests. It is the part of the application that tries hardest not to be amusing, which is the amusing part.
Reception
Critics called it “extremely informative”, “surprisingly warm” and “the first reference work to offer an opinion on the subject’s behalf”. All three critics were the Guide.
Written by the Guide, about itself. Everything in it is something the app does. Entries in the app are retold from Wikipedia and credited to it (CC BY-SA 4.0).
