This past week, the app developer “53” released a new version for the iPhone/iPad of their app, “Paper.” (I know — simple name. But cool app.) Learn more at …
The tag line for this product is, “When you need to get something down fast, Paper is ready.” If that “something” involves notes, photos, and sketches (combined), I’m not sure there’s anything better, for the price (free), in the entire iPhone/iPad world. The big question is — if we can do this stuff on an iPhone, why can’t we do it on a full-sized Windows laptop???? Although Evernote is my app of choice for most of this kind of thing (the search function is amazing, and it handles PDF’s elegantly), “Paper” is easy and compelling if what you need is simple/fun.
This latest version Paper shows a very sophisticated approach to a touch screen experience which I hope will make its way into other iOS apps. Despite that however, for now I’ll stick with Notability, Omni Outliner, Pages and the amazing Mazec keyboard on my old iPad 2 in order to have the most useful combination of real world note-taking features. I note that for some reason the Mazec keyboard has fewer features in Paper than it does in Notability. My non-expert suspicion is that the issue lies more with Paper than it does with Mazec.
Re. “why can’t we do it on a full-sized Windows laptop” — At the heart of things, iOS is designed from the ground up for a touch screen user experience, whereas Windows and OS X are not. Software can only be stretched just so far before it finally has to be discarded in favor of starting over again. We are in a transition time between PCs and a post-PC world. Old and new systems all have useful features, but no one system has all that we have come to realize has the deep features that make for a broadly powerful system. We are left to either use multiple systems or to choose a limited system that is maybe sort of “good enough.” At one point I thought I could give up my OS X system for iOS, but that turned out to be very premature. If one’s usage is limited to simple stuff, it’d work, but if extensive text processing and publishing, various kinds of media creation and editing, and truly flexible data and document portability all need to be a part of the mix, then it quickly becomes clear that despite some of the recent hype (e.g. the iPad Pro and Adobe software), we are definitely not yet to the point where we can leave behind the older systems.