We are very excited to be sharing our Papers love with even more people this Valentines day. For over two years we have secretly worked on a version of Papers for Windows. Now, the time has finally arrived that we are ready for a pre-release.
Papers has an award-winning, intuitive user interface, and we wanted to bring this same ease-of-use to Papers for Windows, while preserving a traditional Windows look. It also has much of the same core features as Papers2 for Mac, but there are some differences. Although we want to have both versions aligned as much as possible, some features are still under development in Papers for Windows. When first trying Papers for Windows, it is important to keep these differences in mind, and they are listed in more detail here.
A version of Papers for Windows has been the topic of many requests from both current users, and those who would like to become Papers users (but didn’t want to buy a Mac). After our Papers2 release, the requests for a Windows version kept pouring in, and we are happy that we can finally announce we have been working on this exciting new release for some time already in collaboration with Scimatic, which is based in Toronto, Canada.
Much like Papers2, Papers for Windows was built from the ground up. This brought with it the challenges you can expect from cross-platform development, as well as the occasional surprise. We made the decision to launch Papers for Windows as a public pre-release, after our beta trials, to make sure any bugs can be ironed out before our official release date in March. At this time, one feature that has not been sufficiently tested is Mac to Windows (and visa versa) compatibility, where a user can point both versions of Papers to the same library. Although this may seem relatively straightforward, from a programming perspective there are a number of difficulties with implementing this functionality and we want to make sure we can sufficiently test this internally, as well as expose it to ‘real world’ situations Papers users will face.
The Papers for Windows journey has been a long and exciting one. Recently, this included two smaller-scale beta releases and some intense in-house testing where we were able to streamline the program more, avoid some major bugs, and made some major updates and changes. However, the best part of the journey is starting now. We hope Papers for Windows will allow some of our current Papers users to take their libraries to work, or home, where this was previously not possible. We also hope to welcome new Papers users who will finally be able to enjoy Papers for the first time on their PC.
~ The Mekentosj Team