Quip, The Word Processing App From Facebook's Ex-CTO, Is Releasing A Bunch of New Features

When Bret Taylor, former CTO of Facebook, launched Quip with co-founder Kevin Gibbs back in July, he wanted to reinvent document creation and tailor it to mobile world.

Basically, Quip is like Google Docs, but amped way up for your phone or tablet.

Today the company is releasing a bunch of new features for Quip.

Quip is intended to allow you to create collaborative documents through the app or on the web that are incredibly responsive to whatever screensize you use to view or edit them. Unlike with Word and Google Docs, you're not automatically relegated to a print-friendly 8.5 x 11 format. There's a chat thread for each document so that everyone working on it can communicate easily and you can view exactly what changes have been made to a piece "since the beginning of time."

The Quip team has worked hard to make sure that writing and editing documents works as flawlessly offline as it does when you're connected to the web. Quip is free for personal use but companies with more than five users pay $12 per user, per month.

Taylor uses Quip every day for work, of course, but he also uses it to swap recipes and cooking stories with his extended family and, this fall, to help his cousin work on her college essays.

"It's great because I can give her comments and advice without having to bounce back and forth between email and a word processor," Taylor told Business Insider.

The company just announced that it's adding a slew of new functions.

• You can now import documents from Word, Google Drive, Evernote, or Dropbox.
• You can use inbox filters to stay on top of different updates.
• Try out Focus Mode to hide the chat thread so you can get work done without distraction and the new notification settings to choose what updates do or do not get pushed to your account.

One of the coolest updates, though, is that you can now give Quip a try without going through the hassle of registering. Start using the app instantly, and only register when you're sure you want in or when you want to start collaborating with other people.

"This product release takes all the early feedback we got into account," Taylor says. "The new features match the way people are actually using Quip, instead of the way that we thought they were using it. And now you don't need to buy into our vision of the world right away to start trying it out."