Major app update adds 'like' button, themes and comments
Quip, the productivity app created by ex-Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and founder of Google App Engine Kevin Gibbs, today unveils new features as Version 1.7 launches simultaneously on the iPhone, iPad, Android, and desktop.
New features include Themes, introducing greater personality to documents, and new ways for users to better interact and collaborate with each other such as inline Comments and a Facebook-inspired 'Like' button.
The Quip team has a long history with the 'Like' button and a number of the team, led by Quip CEO Bret Taylor, launched it at FriendFeed in 2007 as a lightweight way to acknowledge people's posts. When Facebook rolled out the feature in 2009, it became a cultural phenomenon.
'The power of the 'Like' button is its simplicity; with a single click, you can tell a friend that you appreciate what they've done. It's a small gesture, but it has also become a meaningful way to communicate and bring people closer together,' said Taylor.
'Today, we're introducing the 'Like' button on Quip in an effort to bring some of these positive social interactions into the workplace. More than any other feature, the 'Like' button illustrates our deeply-held belief that the software we use to get work done should be as fun to use as the software we use outside of the office.'
'Our goal at Quip is to seamlessly integrate messaging and documents, stripping out many of the features you see in legacy word processors. We aim to do for the era of smartphones and tablets what Microsoft Office did for the era of PCs — we want Quip to be the essential productivity suite for the mobile generation, and with these new features we're improving the Quip experience,' added Kevin Gibbs, Quip's co-founder and Head of Engineering.
Since launch in 2013, the ability to leave inline comments has been the most frequently requested feature from Quip's customers. With Quip 1.7, users can now highlight a specific part of a document and have a conversation about it. When someone leaves a comment in the document, a message bubble in the margin appears, and the comment thread can be read on desktop, tablet, or phone. Once Quip is installed on a phone, notifications appear every time someone leaves a comment, and users can respond without leaving the document. Quip is on a mission to ensure documents look beautiful on every device and this is why the team put a great deal of thought into the typography of Quip documents when the product was first released. In a bid to bring diversity to Quip documents, Quip 1.7 marks the rollout of four new, professionally designed 'themes' for Quip, including typefaces from Commercial Type with a broad range of personalities.
With Quip 1.7, users can click on any 'diff' to restore the document to a previous version. It is now possible to revert to any previous version of the document, no matter how long ago the document changed. In this release, two widgets for Quip on Android have been introduced, which allow users to either view their Inbox or a specific Quip document from a phone's home screen or launcher. With the widget, users can keep a personal to-do list always in view, making it easy to stay on top of tasks and check things off on the go.
