Last week I read glowing news about this new App from Facebook called Paper that was somehow supposed to change my life for the better. Time newspaper called Paper, “The Future of Facebook”. Here’s what Paper looks like on an iPhone:
So Paper has a vertical orientation and lets you scroll through Facebook news in the bottom half by swiping left or right. On the top are major news categories that you can scroll through, which then changes the articles that show in the bottom half. Facebook has pre-defined news categories for you to choose from, however you cannot add your own personal categories which is a huge limitation for me.
Being curious, I downloaded the app to my iPad3 and was instantly shocked that this app only works in the vertical orientation, not at all in the landscape orientation which I use my iPad for 100% of the time. So Paper is worthless to me on the iPad, end of story, epic design fail for Facebook:
It’s really difficult for me to imagine an App being released in 2014 by a major technology company that is limited to vertical orientation only.
A Trademark lawsuit has already been filed by FiftyThree against Facebook for using the name “Paper”. Not only did Facebook fail on the app orientation, they lacked enough creativity in naming the crippled app.
