
Paper – stories from Facebook on the App Store - wdaareg
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-stories-from-facebook/id794163692
======
cfinke
I tried it and found no redeeming qualities, except that the app is pretty
when it's filled with demo content.

* Do you find Facebook's iPhone app too easy to understand and navigate? Try Paper!

* Is the type in Facebook's iPhone app too easy for you to read? Try Paper!

* Are you tired of swiping down on Facebook's app and wish you could do some swiping left and right? Try Paper!

* Do you enjoy losing your place in your newsfeed when you tap on a story to read more? Try Paper!

* Do you enjoy voiceovers reading text to you that is already printed on your screen? Try Paper!

* Want half of your iPhone screen taken up by distracting images unrelated to what you're reading? Try Paper!

* Tired of having two good apps for news and Facebook and want a single app that does both poorly? Try Paper!

* Do you LOVE generic app icons that could mean "news", "email", "flashcards", or "envelopes"? Try Paper!

* Tired of not having to wave your phone in the real world to see the sides of a digital photo? Try Paper!

* Prefer apps that require a tutorial before you can use them? Try Paper!

* Want to read stories from "the world's best sources," but only inside of a walled garden? Try Paper!

~~~
grinich
This is a geek's response to an incredibly well-designed product.

What bothers me more is the blanket sarcasm and disregard in your comment. An
incredible team spent years working on this, sweating every detail. Isn't that
worth investigating, rather than taking cheap shots at the icon design or
voiceovers? Even the Dropbox app has an intro tour.

There's a lot of great stuff in Paper.

~~~
cfinke
I disagree that it's "incredibly well-designed." Extensively designed maybe.

 _What bothers me more is the blanket sarcasm and disregard in your comment._

I downloaded it and tried it. I added topics to my Paper, tried out all the
features suggested in the intro. I tried to read my friends' updates. I found
it tiring to have to concentrate so hard to consume information from the tiled
layout that is much more appropriately conveyed in a list, like in the main
Facebook app.

 _An incredible team spent years working on this, sweating every detail. Isn
't that worth investigating, rather than taking cheap shots at the icon design
or voiceovers?_

Great teams occasionally spend lots of time making something that doesn't
succeed. Cuil. Color. Facebook Paper.

If you disagree with any of my specific criticisms, I'm happy to discuss them.

~~~
moogleii
* Do you find Facebook's iPhone app too easy to understand and navigate? Try Paper!

Ha.

* Is the type in Facebook's iPhone app too easy for you to read? Try Paper!

Didn't find Paper's type difficult to read.

* Are you tired of swiping down on Facebook's app and wish you could do some swiping left and right? Try Paper!

Ha. As if the original app didn't have horizontal swiping.

* Do you enjoy losing your place in your newsfeed when you tap on a story to read more? Try Paper!

As far as I could tell, the cards at the bottom maintain their order after you
dismiss a story. It even has its own scroll bar position indicator.

* Do you enjoy voiceovers reading text to you that is already printed on your screen? Try Paper!

Didn't have my headphones on, didn't notice them.

* Want half of your iPhone screen taken up by distracting images unrelated to what you're reading? Try Paper!

The top half are headlines. There's not much to read there. The bottom half
goes full screen once you tap as well.

------
tomasien
Gut reaction review if anyone is interested - I moved FB off my home screen
and moved Paper onto it. It's just Facebook with a better design and none of
the features I never use. It has notifications, posting, stories, etc. It's
great.

~~~
josefresco
Sooo it's like Flipboard? I use Flipboard to view my Facebook feed and
generally prefer it to the actual Facebook app.

~~~
bcohen5055
I think I actually prefer the interface to flipboard, my only issue at this
point is that I want to curate my feeds better. For instance the tech feed
features Gizmodo, the verge, OZY, Techcrunch etc... but I only read 1 of those
sites regularly. Also, I'd like to lump my friends into different feeds so
college buddies, co-workers, family are on individual streams

~~~
kamilszybalski
We are working on solving this amongst other problems with www.discovle.com

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product50
It is kind of sad that Facebook threatens legal action on any company which
uses "Face" or "book" in their names BUT they find it ok to use an already
well-established app's name ("Paper") for their own app. Not sure how anyone
at Facebook can reason that with a straight face.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Because Facebook owns the trademark on Facebook and therefore has to protect
it. FiftyThree doesn't appear to own a trademark on Paper.

~~~
hhandoko
"Paper by FiftyThree" is a registered trademark.

[1] -
[http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:qzi8jw...](http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:qzi8jw.3.1)

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0x0
Does anyone know how the app is able to login to facebook automatically? It
doesn't show up in ios settings "allow these apps to use your facebook
account", and it didn't seem to do the custom app-url-protocol flip-flop over
to the main facebook app. Or is it as simple as a shared keychain entry
because the app is signed by the same publisher as the main app?

~~~
kenrikm
Best guess is they use "identifierForVendor" mixed and some other
verifications to log it in. Might be worth looking into, security bugs are fun
to find.

~~~
mmasashi
It seems you are right. Paper recognized my account even without iOS native
Facebook login.

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aaronbrethorst
Three things of note:

* It's really pretty, which makes perfect sense given the pedigrees of who was involved in its creation ([http://www.mikematas.com/](http://www.mikematas.com/) and [http://www.atebits.com](http://www.atebits.com), among others)

* The IPA file is huge given what it does. It seems like the bulk of the 50.4MB download is consumed by the completely unnecessary first-launch video.

* I found the app difficult to use, which is especially surprising given the pedigrees of who was involved in its creation. The process of switching between different data feeds was unintuitive to me, and I felt like there several instances where it simply failed to respond to my touches (I have an iPhone 5s, so device performance shouldn't be a problem).

Anyway, I promptly deleted it. I'll probably try it again in a couple months.

~~~
21echoes
looking at the unzipped ipa file, it looks like a solid 40.7 MB of the app is
just the binary ! another 9.8MB is the FBMessenger assets.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
That's wild.

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k-mcgrady
1\. What a terrible icon. 2. Really well designed app. I think it might
replace the main Facebook app for me.

~~~
josefresco
Agreed on the icon, terrible design. I'm surprised they didn't make it red to
further compete directly with Flipboard.

~~~
navs
I'm surprised they didn't spend a billion on buying Flipboard. Then again I
don't know if Flipboard is in the same league as instagram in terms of active
users.

------
LukeWalsh
Aside from how beautiful it is I think buried inside is a unique solution for
a problem that often occurred while browsing Facebook. Viewing widescreen
photos in portrait was difficult without turning the phone (and many people
lock portrait orientation). Paper uses the accelerometer to allow you to pan
and view the entire image. I literally said "wow" out loud once I realized
that I had already looked at two widescreen photos and not even noticed how
seamless it was.

------
calbear81
I think it's a well designed app and has a lot of nice gesture based
interactions that become relatively natural once you play with it for a few
minutes. You lose a bunch of the less used stuff and so far I don't think I've
seen a sponsored post loaded in yet.

\- Adding in content categories are exposing me to sources that don't normally
show up on my Facebook feed which increases my likelihood to "like" them and
drive more interaction.

\- Massive real estate given to photos in HD resolution might increase the
general quality of photos that folks post on Facebook since those really pop
out in the article scroller.

\- This large card format is going to make advertisers salivate as you can now
use vertical scrolling space (if FB allows it) within the Paper format. Scroll
down for more details, etc.

------
rafeed
Just downloaded onto my iPhone and it's pretty cool... however, I don't think
I'm the right audience. My life isn't nearly as interesting as Mike Matas and
co. It just makes all the shitty pics that everyone posts on my newsfeed look
that much worse.

------
0x0
I wish there was an option to disable relative timestamps. They are very
poorly executed in this app in particular. After playing around with the app
for a couple of hours, even stories that are more than an hour old are still
rendered with "just now" or "3 minutes ago" as the timestamp. :(

In general: If you are going to hide the timestamps and replace them with an
oh-so-convenient "X minutes ago" relative time, you should make damn sure that
relative time is current at all times. Preferably even in screenshots and
printouts.

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vasundhar
UI is fantastic! * Its Facebook's attempt to bubble wrap you in what it thinks
you fit. * Flipboard,Circle,NewsStand ... Why this ? *My Question would be, is
it not essential to have USP for an established company to launch a product of
their choice ? #justasking.

~~~
vasundhar
I mean pulse not circle

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barce
The strategy around paper seems pretty smart. Rather than re-design Facebook's
mobile experience, they just created a new app to interface with it. Given the
track record for re-designs simply failing and causing user revolt, this is
very shrewd.

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caiob
As usual, Canadian users are left out. ugh...

~~~
0x0
Europeans too. Had to switch over to my fake-us account to get it. Which means
I'm unlikely to update it since that means signing out and in and out and in
again.

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Finster
The biggest pain point I have is that when stuff pops up in the top half of
the main view, and then goes away. There's no way to get back to that content
without scrolling through the bottom half, and if you happen to miss it (which
is easy to do) then you're left wondering where the heck is that article or
post.

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thecosas
I'm interested to see how they're leveraging data on what you've clicked on or
read in the past to deliver better content as you (and others) use it to read
news in addition to friends' updates.

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valvoja
The app icon doesn't really look Facebook-like and the second screenshot look
like a photoshop disaster. If I had never heard of the app, I wouldn't think
it's an official Facebook product.

~~~
travem
Agreed. When I first saw it in the app store all I could read was "Paper -
stories from…"[1]. You don't even see the word Facebook until you click
through.

[1] [http://pic.twitter.com/MoYtlFfxFv](http://pic.twitter.com/MoYtlFfxFv)

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robinhoodexe
Seems nice, but too bad it's not available on the Danish App Store

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austenallred
FYI: It appears to not be available for download in the United States.

~~~
togasystems
Does anybody know their strategy here?

~~~
objclxt
It can take time for apps to propagate through the App Store once it goes
live. It is not a 'flick a switch and the app appears everywhere' process.

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blueblob
In the default font size this looks really bad in firefox 26 on archlinux.
Is/did anybody else having/have this problem? How do I fix it other than
making the font bigger?

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fossuser
It's a beautiful app - my initial impression is that it takes longer to move
through content. It'll be interesting to see if people begin to use this
regularly.

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IE5point5
> In our push for polish we had a goal of never dropping a frame on high-end
> devices, and we mostly achieved that goal. The engineering complexity here
> is finding a way to fully utilize the multicore architecture of newer
> iPhones

Sorry… but all the app shows are a bunch of photos and a bit of text. Never
dropping a frame on the most high end of devices isn't anything to boast
about, To be honest for what it's doing it shouldn't be dropping a frame on
any device in the past 3 years

