Paper by FiftyThree 4
A sketchbook you’ll be drawn to
Free (or $5.99 every six months) From FiftyThree, fiftythree.com Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 10 or later
Paper feels like it’s having an ongoing identity crisis. It began life as a digital sketchbook for iPad, but when the app made its way to iPhone, it was in part reworked as a way to create presentations; journals were replaced by a stack of cards that — on a tap — pleasingly exploded into a grid.
Fans were horrified at the change, which is probably why version 4 has reverted to being a set of digital journals (though the grid remains an option).
Paper remains broadly usable and elegant. You use gestures to enter and exit journals, and have a small, responsive set of tools. Using either a finger or stylus, the pens and watercolor brush feel great, and there’s a snapshape tool for more precision.
But the more you use Paper, the more restrictions you discover. For example, you can add a background image to a sketch, which can be a template (graph paper, photo, storyboard-style frames), but only one. Text cannot be overlaid on a sketch, and is instead added as a note. Worse, although notes retain Paper 3’s clever swipe-to-style system, they are no longer attached to the bottom of a card in grid view. Now in grid and journal alike, your note is pinned on top of your picture, which is bafflingly ungainly in an app gunning for sophistication.
Journals can have custom covers, but these can’t be created in-app — instead, you import a picture or snap a photo. In grid view, you can rearrange pages, but not rotate them. There’s an elegant cut tool, but you can copy ink between pages only when you buy a six-month subscription. Paper’s search feature outlines recently edited journals, but if you have loads of sketches, you can’t zero in on any given one, because Paper won’t search your notes, nor can you tag individual drawings.
Paper 3 tried to be different. While we wouldn’t go so far as to call Paper 4 a regression, it’s something that feels almost as troubling for what was once a fresh, innovative sketching app: a hesitation. The bottom line. The app equivalent of a greatest hits album rather than a new release.