Bronson

I’m on the App Store

August 1, 2018 Apps, Bronson, Highland, News, Weekend Read

This morning, Apple posted a profile of me and my software company, Quote-Unquote Apps. If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, you can read the piece here.

Or just open the App Store app and I’m on the front page.

Yes, it’s a little frustrating that the article is accessible only through the App Store app. I get why they do it — they want exclusive content about apps available right where you get them, just like airlines have their own in-flight magazines. But it feels weird to have a link that only some readers can open.

When you agree to a profile like this, you don’t get a lot of control. I didn’t see the story or the photos until it posted. But I’m happy they emphasized the team that makes it possible. Nima Yousefi is our master coder. Dustin Bocks designs everything to pixel precision. Megan McDonnell keeps on top of support issues and finds new scripts each week for Weekend Read.

While this profile mostly focuses on Weekend Read, in reality it’s Highland 2 that occupies most of our time. Since it debuted in May, Highland 2 has become our biggest hit by far. It’s also the most important app for me as a writer, since I use it nonstop for scripts, books and blog posts like this one.

If you still haven’t checked out Highland 2, today’s the day.

And if you’re a screenwriter nervous about making the jump, definitely check out our new PDF on Switching from Final Draft to Highland 2.

Bronson Watermarker gets a minor update

March 1, 2016 Apps, Bronson, Highland, Weekend Read

Bronson Watermarker, our app for quickly personalizing PDFs, has an update in the Mac App Store. Version 2.0.4 fixes a drawing bug. I don’t mention the app as much as Highland or Weekend Read, but Bronson has become the go-to app for a lot of productions in Hollywood. If you’ve received a watermarked script in the past few years, there’s a very good chance it was created with Bronson.

Bronson is available in the Mac App Store.

Go ahead and send happy support emails

June 1, 2015 Apps, Bronson, Highland, Weekend Read

Most of the support emails we get are about problems. Something isn’t working right, or is confusing, and a customer needs help.

Roughly once a week, we’ll get a support email that is, well, supportive. So I thought I’d single two of them them out, both to thank the users who took the time to write them and encourage everyone to tell developers when things are great.

Nabeel wrote in about Weekend Read:

Hey just wanted to say I love your app. I read tons of screenplays and I was actually looking to re-download Final Draft Writer (what I bought an iPad for!) and your app also popped up alongside.

I took a look and it was apparent that you guys have provided a solution to a problem I never realized I had: I hate reading screenplays in iBooks on the iPad! Keep it up guys.

Btw, will you also provide a Mac version in the future?

Thank you, Nabeel!

We originally had plans for a Mac app called Weekend Read Assistant, which was designed to help load scripts onto your devices. With rise of iCloud Drive, that’s become much less necessary. You can simply drag scripts into the Weekend Read folder to automatically push them to all your devices.¹

folder screenshot

Sam wrote in about Highland:

I’m sure you get this suggestion a million times a day, but I’ll still add my voice to the mix: Highland is a phenomenal app, and I would love to see an iPad version. I love that I can use any text editor to write something up in Fountain, but: A. Highland is just beautiful, and B. If I could easily sync between an iPad and a Mac, I’d consider that pretty dandy.

Anyway, I know you probably hear that a lot, so I’ll at least leave you with this: you make a great app. A lot of stuff came up in my life that made me drift away from film for several years, but I’m finally coming back and trying to create something, and Highland has made it a real joy to re-immerse myself in doing creative work (and an affordable joy, at that).

Thanks for your wonderful app.

Thank you, Sam!

We actually have Highland for iPad. It’s on my device right now.

We’ve had a working prototype of the app for more than a year. But the distance between an app that functions and one we’d be happy to ship is much greater than you’d imagine.

A huge part of that is expectation. Does Highland for iPad need to be able to do everything the Mac version does? Should it print? Should it email from within the app? Where should its files live? Does it use iCloud Drive?

My least favorite thing about the otherwise-terrific Ulysses apps is how files often fall out of sync — and it’s a much simpler text-editing app than Highland.

I also wonder if there’s enough money to be made on an iPad app. It’s hard to get real dollar figures on categories within the App Store, but my hunch is that by the time you get into the teens and twenties of the top-grossing productivity apps for iPad, you’re not seeing any real income.

So instead of an iPad version of Highland, we’re working on the next Mac version. That’s what I’m typing this in right now. We have no ETA, but I think you’re going to love it.

In the meantime, if you love an app — one of ours or someone else’s — I’d encourage you to take the time to tell the developer. In our case, every support email gets Slacked to the whole team, and we love virtual high-fives.

We also get notices for every app review. Leaving a positive review for Highland or Weekend Read or Bronson Watermarker lets us know you’re enjoying the app, and lets other App Store users know the app has fans.

Nima Yousefi will hate that I said “automatically” because the process of getting scripts to sync is witchcraft that nearly killed him. ↩

Internationalizing Bronson

July 3, 2014 Apps, Bronson, Highland, International, Weekend Read

Bronson Watermarker PDF, our app for watermarking and password-protecting screenplays and other documents, has an update in the App Store that adds native support for German, Russian and Chinese.

It looks so cool in Chinese:

screenshot

This was our first effort at internationalizing an app. We chose Bronson because it’s the simplest overall: one window, a few menus. We’ll be taking what we learned and applying it to Highland and Weekend Read down the road.

We hired Applingua to do our translations, and I’d happily use them again. The process is pretty straightforward: export all the text strings in your app and ship the file. The company translates each string in order, so they’ll fit back into the proper slots when you drop the translated file in the app bundle.

Why these three languages? Based on our download numbers, these were the regions that were already buying our apps the most.¹ Translating the app into these languages helps the most existing customers, and (hopefully) attracts new ones. We’ll be keeping an eye on download numbers to see if it was worth it.

These were also good test languages for us, because they forced us to reconsider what our interface would look like if some of the text labels became vastly longer or shorter than they were in English. We found that we needed to reposition some elements to make sure strings never got truncated.

Internationalizing Bronson took about a week. The process was fairly smooth, but there were things we hadn’t considered at the start:

“Watermark” is an odd term that doesn’t necessarily have a matching word in other languages. We relied on the translators to figure out what made sense.
In English, the button at the bottom might read, “Save 1 Watermarked PDF” or “Save 3 Watermarked PDFs.” We insert the numeral into the string and pluralize as necessary. But in other languages, the word order and pluralization can be very different. We ultimately decided to keep the English usage of PDF(s), with the assumption that these file types are so ubiquitous that users are unlikely to be confused.
We asked Applingua to translate our Mac App Store product description, but then realized that we also needed them to translate our screenshots, which have text on them.
Even keywords need to be localized so that when a German user searches for Wasserzeichen in the Mac App Store, Bronson shows up.

If you want to test out what an app looks like in different languages, here’s how to do it:

Open System Preferences and choose Language & Region.
Click the + below the list box and choose a new language.
Drag that language to the top of the list.

The next time you launch the app, it will use the localized language bundle if it exists.

With this new build, we’ve lowered the price to $19.99. We sold remarkably well when we launched at $14.99, but the full $29.99 price seemed to be higher than the market would bear.

We’re also offering site licenses for companies. One of our favorite animation studios was our first site license, and it was great to be able to provide them a custom version. If you’re interested, drop us a note through the Bronson support page.

If you haven’t checked out Bronson yet, look for it on the App Store. And if you already have Bronson, we could really use some reviews. Each new version pushes old reviews off the landing page.

Because you’ll ask, here are our top 20 countries, in order: US, UK, Canada, Russia, Germany, China, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, India, Turkey, Singapore, France, Spain, Thailand, Hong Kong, Chile, Italy, Columbia, Peru. ↩