The tool Petschnigg and his company FiftyThree thought up is the aptly named Paper, designed exclusively for the iPad. It's essentially a blank slate of paper devoid of settings panels, menus, and adjustable line widths. If Paper looks familiar, it's probably because the team behind it has an interesting history: a handful of them spent several years at Microsoft, with a good chunk of that time focused on the Courier, a dual-screen, digital notebook which had the tech world salivating. That device and its software was very publicly killed by Microsoft, but you can see threads of it that survived in this new project.
Still, the FiftyThree team is reluctant to admit that there's Courier DNA in Paper, perhaps only because the project they so passionately incubated never came to be. Whatever the case is, the humanistic sensibilities that made the Courier so attractive are very much present in this app, unbound from the chains at Microsoft. And that’s a very good thing.
When you first open the app, you first see a panoramic view of all of your notebooks floating in mid-air. Each notebook looks like a premium Moleskine journal, fit with a stunning cover and pages that look soft to the touch. When you tap a notebook, you're launched into a CoverFlow-esque page browser where you can thumb through sketches in your notebook. Tap a new page and your entire screen turns an almost white shade of vanilla, unadorned by faux binder rings or ripped edges you see in other apps.
Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal your artist's palette, and swipe down again to hide it. Paper comes with an eraser and just one tool to draw with, a fountain pen that's unlike any fountain pen I’ve used. The faster you move your finger, the thicker the line gets. For $1.99 each, you can purchase four other tools, denoted not by their conventional names but instead by utility: there's Write (ballpoint), Sketch (pencil), Outline (marker), and Color (watercolor paintbrush). Each of the five tools has its own unpredictable personality worth mastering, which makes these instruments so much more interesting than conventional digital pens and pencils you can find in other apps. The FiftyThree team chose these five tools because they encompass the five most common scenarios they encounter when mapping out ideas and art on a daily basis.
Do you remember the last time you used iOS’s "shake to undo" feature? Perhaps the most impressive tool in Paper is Rewind, an inventive take on "undo" that succeeds where others have failed. If you make a mistake while you're drawing, there's no need to erase it. Just place two fingers on the screen and move them in a counter-clockwise motion. The app retraces your steps, brush stroke by brush stroke, to a maximum of 20 previous moves. Once you've tried Rewind, you'll wish it were present in every other creative app you've tried. It's a user interface breath of fresh air invented by filmmaker (and FiftyThree designer) Andrew S. Allen, who wanted an "undo" method that worked like the jog dials he uses to go back and forth in time while editing video.
To move back and forth between pages while working, you can swipe inwards from the left or right side of the iPad's screen to change pages. To close your current page, pinch inwards with your fingers and you'll see your notebook's pages at a glance. From this view, you can trash a page, add a page, or share your page to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. And that's really about it. Paper is very intuitive to use and has almost no learning curve, which is aided by its smooth animations and realistic design. Paper takes advantage of OpenGL graphics generally reserved for gaming to produce realtime shadows, swift page turns, and lightning fast pinching and zooming for popping in and out of your notebooks. Graphics are one of the many elements of Paper that feel "right" from a design standpoint.
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