New York-based developer FiftyThree today launched Paper version 3.0, calling the new version of the note-taking program the biggest update in the app’s history. The free app brings all of a user’s text notes, lists, photos, and sketches together, providing a space to collect ideas in any form the user prefers. The updated version of the three-year-old app comes with support for the Apple iPhone and several new features.
In announcing the new version, FiftyThree said its goal is to turn the app into the ultimate productivity-based, mixed-media note-taking and idea-aggregating app. Users can now use Paper to add images, photos, and text, which can then be customized with a series of swipes. Users can also pick up text snippets, move them around on their screens using one of their fingers and make lists out of them.
Virtual Stacks
The features of Paper include: the option in each note to take a photo, type a note, or sketch out an idea; the ability to create fast lists, bullet points, or headlines with a swipe; a new filter that lets users spotlight the area in photos and screenshots that they want to call attention to; as well as tools to make sketches, diagrams and graphs.
Additionally there’s a feature that lets users put text, photos, and sketches together in a grid that shows them all at once and enables users to rearrange them into presentations, outlines, or storyboards. Users can see and make sense of their ideas by having them laid out like walls of sticky notes, FiftyThree said on its Web site.
Also, the app always opens to new notes, so users can put down their ideas right away. In previous editions of Paper, ideas were presented as virtual notebooks, called spaces, with each sketch represented as its own page. Version 3.0, however, presents spaces as virtual stacks of paper.
Pencil or Finger?
Users can tap on photos to zero in on specific details, or else annotate images with notes and drawings and export them to PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote, Dropbox, or post them on social media.
Paper 3.0 works across iPads and iPhones that run iOS 8 and later versions, and works with Pencil, FiftyThree’s Bluetooth stylus, to make it easier to sketch out ideas — although some early users of the new version of Paper have found it easier to just draw with one of their fingers instead of using the stylus.
The app’s iPhone interface resembles a smaller version of the iPad interface, with most features accessible with a tap or two. Paper is available for free download in the App Store or at FiftyThree’s Web site.
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