The much speculated Facebook reader is real, it's called Paper and I have to say it looks beautiful. As shown in the the promotional launch video, the app is all gesture driven (though some of the gestures look impractical) and it looks to be a new and pleasant way to stay up to date with the stories that matter to you, with a design UI that takes a lot from other established reader apps like Flipboard.
Gizmodo summarized it best when they described the UI as "well as being fast, also sounds deliciously design-rich: wide photos will pan as you move your phone, objects pleasantly fade in and out, and news stories appear like Twitter-style cards." The one part of the UI that doesn't make practical sense to me is the moving your phone from side to side to reveal more of a wider image. It seems cool on the surface, but I don't like the idea of doing that in real life. I just want to read while getting from point A to point B, not oscillate on a bus seat. I also find it strange that as we push further into tech and digital functionality, design keeps trying to be analog (like the film camera with the manual shutter release and a letter in an envelope).
That aside, I am looking forward to trying this app, and seeing how news sources, like Fstoppers, fit into it.
Learn more on Facebook's gorgeously designed microsite, and try the app for yourself on February 3.
Looks really nice! - my biggest problem is that I feel it will make less people comment/like stuff they see, and it will make them just skip from one story to another
Will the Facebook filtering the stories just like on the timeline? Will you must pay or 80% of subscribed readers never see your contents?
EXCELLENT question. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
How is this Photography related?
Photographers use social networking to find clients. Furthermore, the article's focus is how the new app displays photos.
Personally, I don't want my landscape style photos to oscillate so I'll post mostly portrait oriented pictures to facebook.
It's an interesting observation of yours that digital is trying very hard to mimic analog. I think it has to do with a disconnect with digital content and physical content, I think "feeling" information is part of how we've evolved to absorb information. If we can get to a point where the tactile sensations are analog while the content storage/access is digital...that would be a really cool balance.
Yay! Another stand alone app from Facebook! Wait until they combine this with another app and after they realize its a mistake take this app out and make it a standalone app again only to constantly update it to make it better or worse, while giving no thought to the usability of the app or it's design! Or better yet?! Why not just take this rushed app and combine with their Facebook app and make one huge steaming pile of crap app?! Ohhh the possibilities!
Agreed! They used sound quite effectively as well.
looks like a copy of Flipboard. nearly same design, same gestures, same animations! So I don't need another Facebook app, I use Flipboard
The app is nice, but it looks a lot like Flipboard. I don't think I'll give Paper a try, because I'm using Hinto.co to read my news every day and it's great. Here's my page on Hinto for example: