There are a lot of sketch apps. I mean a lot. Layers, Brushes, iDraw, SketchBook Pro, SketchPad HD, SketchyPad, Draft, and Penultimate, to name a few. If you build in the concept of ideating, the list only grows longer, with apps like Evernote, MindNode, Adobe Ideas … well, I think we all get the point. It’s a saturated market.

But a new app called Paper, by a promising new company named FiftyThree, is jumping right in.

“There are many note taking applications which are useful, but boring,” FiftyThree co-founder Georg Petschnigg tells Co.Design. “Then there are paint programs, that require a lot of skill to make something beautiful. Paper is where productivity and beauty come together.”

Paper is, at its heart, a small taste of what the Courier could have been.

In this saturated marketplace, Paper stands out in a few ways. It’s free to download. It’s extraordinarily simple to use. It’s beautiful. And FiftyThree itself was co-founded by two of the incubation leads on the late Microsoft Courier project, Georg Petschnigg and Jon Harris (together, the entire FiftyThree team has developed Xbox controllers and laptops, created short films, and designed graphics for TED talks).

In other words, Paper is, at its heart, a small taste of what the Courier could have been. Well, the small taste that isn’t from the iPad’s other Courier-team-developed app, which also just released, called Taposé.

“It was that humbling realization that when people ‘need to get creative,’ they’ll reach for a legal pad, whiteboard, or sticky note,” Petschnigg tells Co.Design. “That’s pretty humbling for a team that made laptops, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office for a living! We realized that we use pen and paper like everyone else, because it is simple, beautiful, and lets you express your ideas freely. So we set out to bring some of that simplicity and beauty to software. We wanted a tool that works more like we think.”

I know what he means. The first thing I think about when loading Paper is actually 37signals’ competing product, Draft. Draft’s approach was to create a scribble app with extreme limitations–black pages, red and white inks–to free the user’s mind to focus on the idea. The result was easy to use but far too clinical. There’s nothing less satisfying than looking back at an ugly idea. I paid $5 for Draft and used it once.