WIRED just published a piece about Paperman: This App Makes Your Laptop Screen Look Like Paper. It's a nice thing to see after all the work that went into this little app.
"Everything on my screen looks like it's on premium stationery."
- Justin Pot, WIRED
Our 11th product
Paperman was the 11th product we released, and in a way, it carries a little bit of everything we learned from the ten before it.
Our first product, DoublOne, was an email client we worked on for years. We spent a long time building in isolation and waiting for things to feel perfect before putting them in front of more people. It taught us a lot, but it also slowed us down.
By the time we started Paperman, we had learned to build much more closely with the people actually using our products.
Simple idea, lots of edge cases
The idea behind Paperman sounds simple: make your screen feel a little more like paper. Making it work properly for everyone is a different story.
It has to work across both macOS and Windows, across different displays, resolutions and aspect ratios, vertical monitors, multi-monitor setups, scaling settings, and all the strange combinations people end up with. There are a surprising number of ways for something as simple as a screen texture to go slightly wrong.
So we kept listening and kept fixing things. A texture that didn't feel quite right. A display setup that behaved strangely. An edge case we hadn't thought of. Tiny improvements, one after another. A lot of those improvements came directly from you.
Why this one feels special
That's probably what makes seeing this WIRED piece particularly nice for us. It reminded us that all those little things add up. What looks like a very simple app on the surface took a lot of work to make something people could just install and use without having to think about any of it.
"I really do like what the texture adds to both reading and writing."
- Justin Pot, WIRED
And honestly, seeing how much people have enjoyed Paperman makes all the work that went into the products before it feel worthwhile too.
Thank you
Thanks for being part of that. For using Paperman, sending us feedback, finding the weird stuff, and helping us make it better. And thank you to WIRED for taking the time to try it.
You can read the full piece here: This App Makes Your Laptop Screen Look Like Paper. If you read it, we'd love to hear what you think 🙌🏽