15M downloads in, FiftyThree brings its Paper drawing app to iPhone.
Developer FiftyThree on Thursday launched Paper version 3.0, deemed the “biggest update in the app’s history” with support for Apple smartphones and a slew of new features. FiftyThree, the company behind popular drawing app Paper and a smart stylus called Pencil, has shaken off its iPad roots by finally launching its virtual Sketchpad app for iPhone. The app combines all your text notes, lists, photos, and sketches in the same space, letting you capture your ideas in whichever form you like. “You can see and make sense of your ideas by having them laid out like a wall of sticky notes,” FiftyThree said. “This is the whiteboard in your pocket that can help lay out presentations, or group similar ideas together for a moodboard.” Version 3.0 was “built for speed” and touch, letting you swipe your finger to create a To Do list, or tap and hold items to re-prioritize. “It’s never been this easy to create shopping lists or organize talking points,” FiftyThree said. The New York-based company has built a solid reputation in the digital creativity sphere since it was founded in 2011, primarily for Pencil and Paper, the latter of which Apple named as iPad’s App of the Year in 2012. It may not be the most feature-packed drawing app out there, but it’s well designed and easy to use, making it an ideal choice for jotting down quick sketches and diagrams.
He’s trying to tell me about his company’s new app—Paper for iPhone, an adaptation and re-thinking of the wildly celebrated iPad sketching app—but the gold Galaxy Note 5 sitting on the table keeps catching the CEO’s eye. “Man, that would be a really nice form factor for this app,” he says. First Facebook named its biggest and best app Paper, copying the name of FiftyThree’s earlier iPad drawing app, and now Apple has named its new stylus a Pencil, just like the iPad accessory FiftyThree already sells. Rather than the journal metaphor of the previous app, which organized users’ sketches into virtual notebooks, the new app arranges your doodles and notes into spaces that look like sticky note-filled walls. Indeed, Apple has often shown affection for FiftyThree’s products, and Pencil was made available for purchase in Apple stores (online and retail) around the world earlier this year. We reached out to the company, which is growing increasingly reliant on hardware sales of its Pencil for its income, to ask how it will react to Apple’s new launch.
Paper now supports both text and photos, along with sketches and doodles, so each note can include a combination of images, notes and drawings. “You don’t want to put photos into your camera roll because they are going to get lost and if you have your notes in some notes application it’s just not that inspiring of a space to revisit them,” Petschnigg told Mashable. In a nutshell, Paper can be used to sketch pictures, scribble notes, highlight photos, and more — the stylus / app combo are designed to replicate anything you may have traditionally used a physical pen and paper for. FiftyThree was widely praised for the design of Paper from its early days — the app won Apple’s Design Award in 2012 — and the company’s thoughtful design choices definitely carry over to this version. It has a big, high-res screen; a pressure-sensitive stylus; and a self-selecting set of users who buy the phone because it promises Maximum Productivity.
We’re excited to launch the all-new Paper on iPhone and iPad tomorrow, after which creative thinkers everywhere will see their phones and their ideas in a new light. The app now uses gesture-based navigation, so you can pinch and swipe to move between spaces and notes, that is both intuitive and beautiful to watch. But Paper goes beyond the basics — back in May, the company introduced a new set of digital drawing tools to expedite the creation of charts, diagrams, and sketches. FiftyThree tweaked Paper’s interface a bit in this version to integrate some new features and to make it more iPhone-friendly, but if you’ve used Paper before, you’ll still feel right at home in Paper 3.0. The so-called “Intention Engine” second-guesses what freehand sketchers are attempting to create, kind of like the technology behind predictive texting.
They strike at any moment and come in many forms,” the company said. “Screenshots or photos of things we want to remember, checklists, loose sketches, stream-of-consciousness words, diagrams, emails to ourselves — whatever your idea and whenever it hits, Paper’s cutting-edge tools will capture and communicate it with speed and polish.” In previous iterations of Paper, the app would present your ideas as virtual notebooks (called “spaces” in Paper parlance), with each sketch represented as its own page.
But Petschnigg isn’t worried—his company will support the new Pencil, too, and he hopes Apple’s foray into stylus territory will be good for everyone. You also have the ability to highlight portions of photos through a new spotlight tool, which will be particularly helpful for emphasizing specific areas of an image.
While Paper was always free to download, users traditionally had to pay for additional drawing tools, but in February FiftyThree made everything completely free. And as Jobs biographer Rick Tetzeli pointed out, it took a quarter century to move from the personal computer to the mobile computer, and it could take just as long before we see the next major breakthrough. It’s surprising to see such a muted response from FiftyThree, particularly when you consider the company’s reaction to Facebook’s Paper app — another generic app name first claimed by FiftyThree. While some onlookers may be confused by the company’s seemingly new emphasis on productivity, Petschnigg, who previously worked on Microsoft’s Office team, says these tools are the natural evolution for the company. “We’ve always seen ourselves as a productivity tool, it’s just a longer arc,” he said. “What happened is that we missed out on a very very important part of the productivity process which is a space where you go to think.
This shifts the debate from being about whether or not Apple ought to be copying the hard work of others (and to be fair, plenty of companies have copied from Apple over the years) to a more salient question: Whose product does it best? The company will naturally support Apple’s Stylus with its software — and Apple is reciprocating by featuring FiftyThree’s Paper on its iPad Pro pages — but it will also endeavor to establish a foothold for itself on the iPhone. People blame Powerpoint so many times for bad presentations when it’s really people didn’t spend the time to develop the story and that’s a different activity.” Like its iPad-only predecessor, the new Paper app is free and compatible with the company’s Pencil stylus — not to be confused with the Apple Pencil stylus for the iPad Pro Apple announced Wednesday. That effort is accompanied by a $10 discount on the FiftyThree Pencil at present, which means it now starts at $39.95 — significantly cheaper than Apple’s $99 accessory. You can also get a better preview of each item without opening them—you can “pinch” open and peek at the contents of your spaces, or get a nice, large preview of each idea page without having to open them.
Not just pretty and well-composed photos, either: screenshots of text, pictures of signs, all sorts of hacky capture methods. “We started combining that,” he says, “with this basic truth they’ll teach you in design school. The hope for FiftyThree will be that it can carve out a new niche for itself as the foremost iPhone stylus option, the best note-taking app, and the cheaper iPad Pencil alternative. There’s a virtually undetectable latency–-the time between when you begin pressing the Pencil to the screen and the time the iPad knows you’re doing this.
At first glance, the notes feature seems very basic, but in a cool twist, you can quickly and easily turn any line of text into a bulleted checklist item by swiping left to right. But besides this latency improvement, Apple’s Pencil itself doesn’t actually offer any noticeable drawing features that FiftyThree’s Pencil doesn’t. You can use Paper’s many brush tools, its sophisticated color-picker, even the neat tool that figures out you were trying to draw a circle or square and straightens everything out for you.
If you shot a photo, you can put a spotlight around the important stuff, If you want, you can even connect the Pencil stylus and work that way—though that’s a lot more awkward on the smaller iPhone screen. In addition to more robust note-taking tools, Paper 3 also lets you annotate photos: Snap a photo or choose one from your photo library, then doodle on it all you want. What started with a 3.5-inch screen in 2007, progressed through the 4-inch barrier in 2012 with the iPhone 5, before hitting the giddy heights of 4.7-inches / 5.7-inches with the iPhone 6 / 6 Plus in 2014. Then again, Apple’s Pencil only lasts for 12 hours per charge, while FiftyThree’s Pencil lasts for up to 90 days–-that’s handy if you’re sitting in a field sketching sunflowers for days at a time.
Toggling between the image and text portions of a page isn’t immediately obvious, though—you have to tap on the portion of the page you want to edit from the home screen. Why have I been searching in nested menus, or poking through the extra row of keys above the keyboard, when I could just use my finger to move text where it goes? “This is going to become the new standard,” Petschnigg says, and it’s hard to argue.
Rather than stick with the “journals” metaphor Paper has always had, FiftyThree turned to “Spaces.” They’re more like neatly-stacked piles of paper strewn all over your desk, each one endlessly sortable and available for you to flip through. Paper’s iPhone interface is essentially a shrunken-down version of the iPad interface: All the features are right where you’d expect them to be, but you may need to tap once or twice more to get at some of them. As far as cosmetic design, Apple’s Pencil is what you would expect: a cold-looking sliver of white plastic (Steve Jobs might use it to impale himself if he saw it). You start in the app’s homescreen, which is just a scrollable list of your spaces; tap or swipe into one, and the individual pages come apart as if they’re being spread out in front of you. FiftyThree’s Pencil, on the other hand, while trying a bit too hard to appeal to the Brooklyn hipster, at least offers a few varieties such as a nice black, brushed aluminum to give you more style options.
A stylus makes sketching easier, but the tips of the styluses I used—including FiftyThree’s Pencil stylus—still felt a little clunky on a four-inch screen. Petschnigg showed me a space he’d created for a board presentation, sketching out two- or three-word slide ideas; he quickly dashed off the outline and sent it to the board for feedback, long before he started really building anything nice.
On one slide is a diagram about his vision of the creative process: an arrow, going around every which way, curling around and over itself 20 times before finally moving vaguely off to the right. Despite some minor annoyances, FiftyThree did an admirable job at cramming lots of functionality into the app, and came up with an interface that works well within the iPhone’s size limitations.
Still, it goes without saying that iPhone 6 or 6 Plus owners (or soon, iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners) will likely have an easier time working with Paper for iPhone than those of us using older devices. It adds plenty of new features—without detracting from the simplicity that made Paper so great in the first place—and if my hands-on experience is any indication, it’s fast and stable. However, two other big features of the Siri Remote–-Siri voice control and its use as a gesture-based game controller—are something we’ve seen before. As a game controller, the Apple TV has clearly borrowed from almost every other digital media player as well as games consoles, including the Roku and Wii. The fact Siri can handle more advanced commands other than simple movie search queries, such as fast-forward and check the weather, makes Apple the innovator in this department.
Though it didn’t unveil the Apple Watch 2 (that’s likely for 2016) it did unveil some pretty cool new anodized aluminum color options: gold and rose gold. Take Storm watches, for example: They’re beautiful, come in a wide array of colors and materials, and have more band options than you could ever need–-and they, you know, tell the time exceptionally well while featuring a battery that lasts for years.