Microsoft Courier To Land On The iPad - For Real
by DM
May 3, 2011
Where were you when you heard that Microsoft killed the Courier?
Fear not: a cousin of Microsoft’s quirky, offbeat and unspeakably-cool digital notebook project is back— and on iPad, no less.
Despite the fact that the Courier video was little more than a tech demo, it turned heads like few other announcements in tech history. Part journal, part “digital scrapbook”, the Courier concept was everything Microsoft is least known for: enigmatic, magical, startlingly intuitive, strikingly beautiful. (I still think it’s the nicest UI I’ve ever seen, anywhere.)
Part of what made Courier so exciting was how open-ended and freeform it was: it envisioned a future in which information is gathered, scattered, circled, captioned and written by hand, then tossed between the margins with (I imagine) a sort of da-Vinci-meets-Evernote bliss. It’s no surprise that, to many of us, Courier’s “death”—its entire existence a vaporware dream—was one of the sadder days in this industry.
But now, some measure of the “little notebook that could” is coming back. A Kickstarter project called Taposé aims to bring Courier-like functionality (including split views, drag-and-drop mapping and organizing, and the infamous “Middle Bar”) to the iPad. It’s too soon to tell exactly what features will be included, and of course, the Courier was designed for use with a pen, but the Taposé project has already received nearly $15,000 in funding, with another 19 days to go. That means the project is legitimate, it's got capital, and it's really happening!
Head on over to Taposé to see more about what went into the elaborate re-imagining of what's considered by many to be Microsoft’s best idea to date.