Oooo, new from Dropbox! About 6 months ago, this project, formerly called Composer, was leaked on Product Hunt. There isn't a lot of information available for this yet but looks like an Evernote competitor. UPDATE: Wired's @pierce just published more details about Paper.

Interesting description from the Wired article, "Paper feels like a cross between Google Docs and Medium."

I've been using Hackpad for about a year; I remain bummed that they got acquired by DropBox, because I now work for a company that uses Box, which means the use-case for Paper is for me far more limited than if it had remained a standalone product. That said, Hackpad is no longer supported, and lately it's become too slow and buggy to be very useful anymore. I'm thrilled that Paper is finally available for public use, because it'll be great to move back to a supported product with Hackpad's core functionality, even without my whole team adopting it. I see a bunch of people here (and in the Wired article @rrhoover posted, as well as this Engadget writeup: http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/...) wondering aloud about how useful this is when we already have not just Word but Google Docs, Evernote, and a whole bunch of other options. Here's why I've continued to use Hackpad past the point of seamless UX (note that Paper has these core features from Hackpad, plus a bunch of upgrades that I haven't spent enough time with yet to review): 1. The newsfeed. I was dismissive of it at first, but when you're working on a team, Google Docs/Drive sharing is only so useful. It's gotten better recently, but I often have trouble finding the document I'm looking for, whereas Hackpad's/Paper's stream of everything in my organization, sorted automatically by how recently it was updated, contributes enormously to efficiency and transparency within a team. You can also subscribe and unsubscribe yourself from a given document, as well as tag others to subscribe them to a document you're working on. 2. Markdown. Hackpad was my introduction to markdown and now that I've adjusted to it, I'm constantly annoyed that I can't use single-key shortcuts in Evernote to format. It should be so much easier. 3. Really great real-time collaboration. You can see at a glance what others have been working on, version history is great, it's all updated in near-perfect sync, and none of it gets in the way. 4. (almost forgot) Auto-indexing. Documents - especially when you're collaboratively brainstorming - can get sooooooo long, and these days we're reading them on a screen too, not just writing them there. Paper's/Hackpad's markdown automatically generates an index of H1 and H2 text, so you can quickly navigate to the part of the document you need (look for the little icon in the upper left corner). Used well, it really helps keep long, sprawling documents from getting too big to be useful.

Yay!

OK, first off I'm an early adopter and (still a) huge fan of Dropbox. However, my knee-jerk reaction to this was not positive. I've been noticing some articles that are 'down' on Dropbox (http://buff.ly/1Lcvg6h). But I hadn't given such link-bait that much credence. However, I have some real pain points on Mac with the core Dropbox syncing and file hosting/sharing capabilities. Therefore, any new feature or service, from Dropbox, that doesn't directly improve core-product kind of bums me out. It's like your actual service isn't sexy enough for you guys anymore and you are getting distracted by the squirrel!-like allure of complementary 'apps' that can have their own names and such. For example, I would've anticipated that Dropbox might look into creating a feature improvement that was like Subversion or "Git Large File Storage" for non-developers vs trying to compete with Google Docs and Office 360. I would love to have some kind of re-imagined file checkin/lock/checkout via Dropbox in order to minimize file conflicts when team members simultaneously open something in a shared folder (I don't believe Dropbox Business offers this - but please correct me if I'm wrong). Keynote + OS X autosave can be a nightmare if my colleagues open a file I'm working on, simply to look at it. Anyhow, I'll try to reserve ultimate judgement until Paper is actually available. BTW, that's now two apps named "Paper" (Facebook and Dropbox) further diluting 53's Paper (creative app) brand recognition. Until then I'll be practicing my daily ritual of watching the Dropbox syncing-conduit spike to over 100% of CPU usage while my Macbook fans go a' spinning... Respectfully yours - J.

Curious! What opportunity does Dropbox see in a space which (subjectively speaking here) has already quite some companies trying to tackle this issue? Google Docs, Evernote, Apple, ... :)

Will there be a mobile app?

It's funny, sharing content between apps/contexts right now feels a lot like sharing files between computers did in 2005. Doable, but painful.

We've been using it internally at Pana for a couple of months and it's amazing!

Looks great! Nice work. Can you embed the output? That would be an awesome tool for maintaining public facing docs.

Excited to see how this works out. If Dropbox can make this leap into collaboration successfully, it's just the beginning.

@tokudu I have had access to it for around a week or two. If you are on a Pro plan just enable teams and get access to it.! :D I only wish there was markdown support :) Anyways good stuff i stopped using Evernote

After playing with Paper for a little while, I think the minimalist approach may hinder the adoption by anyone but techies. "Normals" will likely have trouble grokking the paradigm. That being said, I really like it.

So how does this integrate with core Dropbox? The interface allows me to organize docs in some folders and share them with others but I couldn't find out how to make them show up in my Dropbox folder. Good: Being based on markdown makes it a great editor to collaboratively work on docs you could push later on to e.g. github/gitlab as issue descriptions.

Very happy to see Dropbox putting Hackpad to great use!

Quite a lot of products these days want to become the next best Paper...excited to try this out first-hand!

LOVE Paper!

Just got into the Beta. Excited to try it out. :)

Any way to get an invite? I'm a long-time Hackpad user and have been on the Dropbox Notes beta list since day one. Weird that I haven't gotten invited yet.

Anyone who got early access here? How is it different from evernote? Any "wow" difference?