John August

Bronson

Go ahead and send happy support emails

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.

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

Internationalizing Bronson

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:

  1. Open System Preferences and choose Language & Region.
  2. Click the + below the list box and choose a new language.
  3. 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.

  1. 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. ↩

To Chase or To Spec

Episode - 147

Go to Archive

Apps, Bronson, Directors, Film Industry, Pitches, QandA, Scriptnotes, Transcribed

John and Craig discuss whether screenwriters are better off pursing writing assignments or working on their own material. They also look at the visual comedy of Edgar Wright, and The Shawshank Redemption’s 20th anniversary.

Links:

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 6-7-14: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Bronson Watermarker, rebooted

Apps, Bronson

We have a new app out today: Bronson Watermarker PDF.

Bronson Watermarker PDF screenshot

It’s in the Mac App Store, and 50% off through Sunday, June 8th.

The new Bronson features a stripped-down UI that indicates where we think Mac app design is headed. Many buttons have lost their edges, relying on color and context to indicate their clickability. Title bars are integrated into the window. Animations take the place of progress bars.1

You can see more screenshots here.

The changes are more than cosmetic. Bronson has new features to protect screenplays and other documents, including password encryption and invisible watermarks.

Bronson Watermarker was our first Mac app, released January 2012. It was deliberately minimalist: one list field, five watermark styles, one checkbox. Over time, we added a button to change the font and opacity, but the app remained essentially unchanged.

It also remained kind of ugly.

Of all our apps, Bronson was starting to feel like the odd duck. It sold well, and we got appreciative emails from people who used it daily. But we weren’t proud of it.

So we took two weeks to remake it. From pixels to code, it’s an entirely new app, with almost nothing carried over from the original. We added in the features users wanted most (passwords, saved lists, better customization) and removed things that never fit quite right (image watermarking, line burn).

Removing features is a tough thing. You end up with a better, more-focused app, but users can argue that it’s a downgrade. The Mac App Store makes it especially difficult, because it replaces the original app with the new version. For almost everyone, the new Bronson is a much better app — unless you really liked what we used to do with JPGs.2

In the end, we decided to make a clean break, shipping the new version as a new app and appending PDF to the name. This let us increase the minimum OS requirements and move it from the Productivity category to Business, where it really belongs. It also means users of the old Bronson can keep their app, or choose to switch to the new one.

Through June 8th, everyone gets the upgrade price of $15. After that, it’s $30.

Just to keep things even, Highland and unlimited library for Weekend Read are also 50% off through June 8th.

  1. WWDC is Monday, so we’ll know soon which of our guesses were correct. ↩
  2. It’s easy to see this conundrum with word processors and screenwriting software, which get bloated with rarely-used features. Most users wouldn’t know if you removed these vestigial bits — but some users rely on them. When was the last time you used Mail Merge? For most people, never. For some, three times since lunch. ↩