It’s Time to Turn to a New Page with Facebook Paper

The day and age of reading the newspaper in the morning has almost (if not already) become an obsolete concept. Everyone knows that the new way to get any information on current events, whether they’re about your friends or about the world, is via the Internet.

Facebook released an app today that does just that. They’ve highlighted all the things that people want to see to update themselves and consolidated them all into one app—Paper.

So, let’s talk about Paper. You open the app and it directly opens up your Facebook, essentially displaying your news feed in a very newspaper, almost Pinterest-esque, style. The part that I liked the best is that when I’m looking through my newsfeed, my focus is usually centered on the pictures and all the graphics. That’s what this app does best.

However, Facebook didn’t just limit themselves to personal lives this time. They included the possibility to browse through blogs by category. Like, I can essentially have a newsfeed for all my tech blogs and photography blogs. And this is a great feature to make it customizable for each person and being able to access all my news from just one app.

As a bonus, they’ve made the experience even better for the user; they made the interface a very swipey one. Slide up to view a post, down to go back to your main screen, pinch in to exit an article, and pinch out to focus on. My personal favorite was when you’re viewing a picture, you don’t even need to touch the screen to pan across the pic—just tilt the phone in the direction you want to look and the picture detects the movement and pans accordingly.

I mean, in my opinion, Facebook Paper has done a solidly amazing job. Kudos to them for a great app.

P.S. – Not only good job with the great app, but good call on making it an entirely new app. That way people don’t get fussy over forcing them to adapt to a change! I’m proud of you, Facebook!

Nothing Good Happens after 2 AM….Except Ninite.com

How annoying is it when you buy a new laptop or reformat your old one and you have to go through the process of installing all the standard applications.

Seriously, everyone knows that the only thing IE is good for is downloading Google Chrome. (Which is no longer true if you’ve taken a look at IE 11’s debugging tools. Oh my god, Microsoft, way to step up your game! But I’ll save that for another post.)

Anyways, so there are those apps that should essentially come preinstalled in this generation, like Google Chrome or Firefox, Skype or Google’s Voice/Video plugin, Dropbox, and even Eclipse (for all those developers out there in the world). And yet, they don’t. So when you get a new laptop, you constantly have to go through that annoying process of going to each of their websites, downloading those setup-google-chrome.exe files and repeating the mindless task of pressing Next’ and waiting.

Guess what. Not anymore!

That’s the sole purpose of Ninite.com. Seriously, go to their site. They have a list (which is constantly expanding, mind you) of applications that you would want to install when you set-up your environment and you just check off the ones you want, install just ONE exe and you’re ready to go.

That one all-powerful exe will take care of all the ‘I Accept’s and all the ‘Next’ buttons of all those apps. So next time you have to setup your computer…say goodnight, because ninite will take care of you and keep your computer ready to go when you wake up the next morning J