After hundreds of scripts and tremendous feedback from our early testers, we’re making our new app Highland available as a public beta. Anyone who wants to try it out is welcome to download.
You’ll see that a lot has changed since I last blogged about it.
For starters, there are now two views: Edit and Preview.
Highland is still at heart a conversion utility, letting you move between Fountain, PDF and FDX files. But we realized in testing that users often need to make minor changes, and having to round-trip through another text editor was too much hassle. So we added a basic editor. It’s not nearly as feature-rich as true screenwriting apps, but it’s surprisingly capable.
You could write a whole screenplay in Highland. I wouldn’t recommend it, but you could.
In addition to dragging in files, you can now create a new file and paste in text — perfect if you’re bringing in material from Google Docs or Mail.
The biggest change took the most time to implement: a robust report card system for tracking how well Highland is importing and exporting scripts. Because screenplays come with so many variations, we’re never going to convert every script perfectly. But with built-in feedback, we hope to keep improving with each update.
Highland is pretty stable, but this really is a beta, folks. It can crash. I say this not to scare you away, but to set proper expectations.
We’re not sure how long this public beta will last. Each build is designed to expire after 30 days, but with built-in updating, we’ll be able to send out new beta versions easily. Our goal is to have it available on the Mac App Store once it feels solid and ready.
Thanks again to our first-round beta testers for all their feedback. Now it’s time for the wider world to kick the tires, and let us know how it can get even better.
If you want to join in, you can download Highland today.