I always considered myself to be one of those wanna-be artists. I always took the art classes at school, the graphic design classes at college, then tried to excel at the Web Design projects at University. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I maybe wasn’t so much an artist, as I was someone that tried too hard.
The iPad has become a ubiquitous tool to help us jot things down, whether with the keyboard, with a finger or *wretch* with a stylus. With Paper I feel like I’m instantly an amazing artist, instantly an amazing writer and planner, and instantly productive. The app greets you with a number of different pre-designed notebooks, allowing you to customize the names of each, the covers of each and start adding things to the pages contained in each. It was exactly at this point that I wondered how long my faithful paper Moleskine notebook would last given the ability to have stylish notebooks on my iPad.
Well, maybe I’ll continue to use it because though Paper allows for numerous notebooks with seemingly unlimited pages, the issue is keeping them backed up. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the app that allows for syncing to Dropbox, Evernote or even iCloud. Bummer.
Nevertheless, Paper does have a great deal of potential when intending to note down plans, do a quick sketch, or even draw pie charts! With its free price-tag and in app purchases, it makes it irresistible to not download it. The in-app purchases allow you to buy new pens and pencils in order to do more creative notes, and at a reasonable £5.49 for the lot, it trumps real paper!
With the added ability of being able to share things to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and send things via email, it does give Paper a bit more potential rather than keeping it as a personal jotting app. Although I don’t think I’ll be swapping out my faithful Evernote anytime soon in favour of Paper, I do think I’ll be using Paper for doodles, planning and maybe go back to my wanna-be roots of being an artist. We’ll see where I end up..
