Paper, one of our favorite apps for the iPad, received a nice update yesterday that makes adding detail to your images and finding inspiration just a pinch and a swipe away.

Pinch to magnify doesn’t just zoom the whole page — pinching open reveals a loupe over your drawing that magnifies the section of the image you want to focus on. FiftyThree describes pinch to magnify as “focusing where it matters, without losing sight of the bigger picture.” It’s quite elegant — there’s no need to pan across an image, be concerned with changing the zoom level, or otherwise feel the need to change the granularity of a tool’s brush size.

The second feature can be found just after flipping swiping through your journals, placed neatly at the end and appearing as stack of sketches with the most recent inspirational sketch on top. Tapping The Made With Paper stream reveals a grid of curated sketches from the community, with each image linking back to the website where it was discovered. While you can’t reorder the Made With Paper stream within your journals, you can rearrange your journals around it if you’d like it to be the first thing you see as you open Paper. Personally, I find this stream much more convenient to browse than FiftyThree’s own Made With Paper blog.

Paper is one of my must have apps for the iPad — you can download it for free from the App Store, with additional tools available as in-app-purchases when you need them.