Today FaceBook released a new way for iPhone users to interact with their network, a stunning app simply called Paper. The design team, led by former Apple designer Mike Matas and the team he brought to FaceBook with him in 2011 when his digital publishing company Push Pop Press was aquired.

Paper is a free download from the App store, and signals a completely new way to interact with FaceBook, bridging the gap between news sources and your news feed.When you first launch the app you are greater by a short video into showing off the application with the simple title screen shown here.

You are then guided through the process of adding additional news sections to your "Paper"The tutorial guides you through the process explaining how the sections relate to each other.There are plenty of preconfigured sections available, and I would guess more will be coming as the application grows.Once you finish adding sections, you are taken to your news feed. As you use the app, blue pop-over dialogs guide you through using the program.

Adding a post has the same elegance of the rest of the app. They did this thing right, and it shows they didn't miss a trick.News sections are just as clean and easy to navigate. Swiping up takes you deeper, swiping down takes you back out closer to your timeline.Once you've tapped on an article to bring it up, swiping up "unfolds it", taking you to the website that is the source of the original article.

Photos on your timeline display full screen, and pan when you turn your phone if they are wider than the phone.Re-posting a photo looks just as clean as anything else in the app. These guys really did a great job.

Conclusion

The folks on the Paper team have done what they were asked to do - try and disrupt FaceBook from the inside before someone outside had the chance to. Drawing on every design element Apple gave them to play with in iOS 7 this team has put together a smooth application that after just a few hours has replaced the regular FaceBook app on my iPhone, and I'm sure it will on yours as well. Trust me, once you spend a little time with it you will never go back.

Engadget:

The next time you hinge open that notebook PC and smile at a feature that makes it easier to use, give a thought to Bill Moggridge, who passed away Saturday from cancer at the age of 69. The pioneering designer invented the modern clamshell design seen in all modern laptops, and is also viewed as the father of human interaction software design. The Compass Computer he designed for Grid Systems with the screen folded over the keyboard appeared in 1981, flew on the space shuttle, and inspired virtually every notebook design since. Perhaps more importantly, when he tried to use the machine himself, Moggridge was exasperated with the difficulty and decided to take the human factor into account for software design. To that end, he engaged experts from fields like graphics design and psychology, and tried to "build empathy for the consumer into the product," according to former partner, Professor David Kelly. The pair merged their design firms to form Ideo in 1991, and worked with clients like Apple, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble, designing products like the first Macintosh mouse and Palm V handheld along the way. In 2010, Moggridge became the director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, and was a recipient of that institution's lifetime achievement award. He also won the Prince Philip Designer's Prize, the longest running award of its type in the UK, given for "a design career which has upheld the highest standards and broken new ground." See why that's true by going to Cooper-Hewitt's tribute video, right after break.

For more information, see the video and bio of Moggridge at Cooper-Hewitt.org