New Delhi: Facebook has launched its first news reader app, called Paper. It will be available for the iPhone in the US on February 3.
Paper, the first app from its Creative Labs division, combines several of the features Facebook is known for while getting rid of some of the clutter. The new app may not have replicated every feature of Facebook's main app, but it does fulfill the majority of people's needs. In short, it is much better.
"Paper makes storytelling more beautiful with an immersive design and full-screen, distraction-free layouts," the company said in a statement. "We've also made it easier to craft and share beautiful stories of your own."
The newly-unveiled Paper is also the first of the new standalone apps from Facebook.
The Facebook Paper app allows users to browse and interact with posts/ stories from their News Feed - the primary function of the regular app. While all the functions of the main app aren't present, Paper's layout is certainly an attractive, high-bandwidth alternative.
What Paper does is that is takes standard Facebook News Feed and recreates it as an immersive, horizontally scrolling set of screens. It also provides a new way to post to Facebook (and Paper) with an elegant WYSIWYG editor. Paper cuts away virtually all buttons and other UI elements to make every status update, photo, and news story appear full-screen. However, the lack of chrome to help place you in the app and tell you how to navigate can be a little disorienting. All in all it is a news-reading app that owes some of its looks to Flipboard.
