Former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and founder of Google App Engine Kevin Gibbs have launched a mobile-first word processing app in Europe, called Quip.
The app is designed for touchscreen devices like tablets and smartphones, with many features associated with Microsoft Word stripped out, leaving a clean writing and editing platform.
Since the introduction of smartphones and tablets, the way people communicate has been transformed, but the software on which we use to get work done on has not changed that significantly in over thirty years.
One of the biggest problems with the way mobile documents work today is the apps that work with documents on your phone are simply shrunk-down versions of the word processors developed for full-sized desktop computers. They have not been adapted to make typing and creating documents easy on smaller screens.
"On Quip, you aren’t restricted to a fixed A4 page size, that you have to pinch-zoom and scroll around in on your phone. Instead, we’ve developed an adaptive rendering system, that lays out your documents naturally on any screen size, from your phone to your desktop," Taylor told The Telegraph website..
Documents are able to be created and edited offline, with Quip synchronising any changes back in to the document when a device comes back on the network.
If multiple users are collaborating on one document, Quip uses push notifications to let other collaborators know what has changed.
"Writing and editing collaboratively is a universal need. We’ve seen as many people using Quip for joint grocery lists, writing their applications to university, and planning family vacations, as we have companies and teams using it to communicate across continents and get work done," said Taylor.
Quip is available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German and on desktop, from the Apple App Store, and in the Google Play Store as a preview release. It is free to use for consumers and costs $12 per user per month for businesses.
