John August

FDX Reader

Final Draft Reader’s limited view

Apps, FDX Reader, Highland, Screenwriting Software

Late last week, Final Draft released a new version of Final Draft Reader, adding support for iPhones to their heretofore iPad-only app.

From a basic design standpoint, their iPhone implementation is almost identical to what we did with FDX Reader, using a continuous scroll rather than page-flipping to accommodate the smaller screen. I won’t break out the old imitation-is-flattery bromide; it’s simply the right choice given the situation.

Unfortunately, you’re going to be scrolling a lot with Final Draft’s version, because they insist on using traditional Courier. It’s a mistake. You simply can’t fit very much on the screen using that font.

Compare two screenshots from Frankenweenie:

iphone screenshots

Like FDX Reader, Final Draft Reader allows you to reduce the font size. By doing so, you can fit the same amount of Frankenweenie on the screen. But you probably wouldn’t like the results:

smaller final draft screenshot

Final Draft Reader isn’t trying to match printed pages like it does in portrait view on the iPad, so there’s simply no good argument for sticking with Courier for this “Reader View.” It’s just bad design.

Being an official product, the app provides “100% accurate Final Draft pagination, formatting and page breaking.” That’s like saying only Coca-Cola can provide pure Coke flavor, but fine.

Their app can do several things FDX Reader doesn’t even attempt, such as editing ScriptNotes and showing colored page revisions. You can link to your Dropbox account, but only for exporting files from the app, so it’s not particularly useful. That’s consistent with a lot of what I found: placeholders and possibilities rather than actual utility.

Final Draft Reader is now free. That makes sense; they want users to pay for the $50 Final Draft Writer app.

We’ll keep selling and supporting FDX Reader as an alternative, but as I wrote back in February, we’re not actively developing it anymore. Our next projects include more ambitious efforts like Highland.

FDX Reader turns one

FDX Reader, Follow Up

fdx reader iconFDX Reader, our app for reading Final Draft scripts on the iPad and iPhone, came out a year ago today.

Usually, when people say, “I can’t believe it’s been a year!” they mean something like look how time flies or it seems like only yesterday.  

But when I say I can’t believe it’s been a year, I mean that I can’t believe it’s been only a year.  FDX Reader feels like something we did a very, very long time ago.

Why is my internal calendar so wrong in this case?

I have a few theories:

1. Digital things move faster.

We’ve become accustomed to shorter and shorter attention cycles for digital goods. Consider Draw Something:

  • Draw Something is a hit!
  • Zynga buys Draw Something for $180 million!
  • Draw Something is tanking!

The rise and fall of MySpace took years. The cycle for Draw Something has run about eight weeks.

Even though the time span has been incredibly compressed, our brains still try to ascribe a certain amount of time for a rise-and-fall cycle, so we subconsciously back-date events.

It’s not just apps that move faster. Many memes are essentially digital, and experience the same time-shift phenomenon.

Quick: When did KONY2012 happen? Was it before or after the Mel Gibson/Joe Ezsterhas fracas? And what about the Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh controversy?

All of these memes burned bright and died out quick, leaving the embers to float in a sea of the recent past. 1

2. My clock started when we began working on the app.

Here’s what I wrote to Nima Yousefi on December 10, 2010:

I think there’s an opening for an FDX Reader (called, perhaps, FDX Reader) that would simply register itself to iOS as able to open .fdx extension files. Then, when someone taps a file with that extension in Dropbox or Mail (or whatever) it can launch. That way, you don’t really have to worry about getting files to into it.

What matters is the reading experience. Make it look nice, like the Instapaper app. Perhaps give the ability to add notes, but don’t try to become a screenwriting app.

If that’s interesting to you, happy to go halfsies with you. Lemme know.

FDX Reader was our very first app. Not only did we need to figure out how to build it — the design, the coding, the testing — we had to learn how to get an app approved and released in Apple’s odd ecosystem. (Just getting an account set up is surprisingly convoluted.)

That process took a little over six months, so it’s reasonable that the app feels older to me.

3. So much has come after it.

In the past year, we’ve released the iPhone version of FDX Reader, several installments of Bronson Watermarker for the Mac, the spec for the Fountain markup language, and successive betas of Highland. (Come back tomorrow for major news on that one.)

All that activity seems like too much to have occurred in just a year, so I’m mentally stretching the time period.

4. The less attention you pay to something, the further back in time you push it.

We don’t really do much with FDX Reader now. Our last update simply upgraded the graphics for the new iPad. If as rumored the new iPhone has a larger screen, we’ll make whatever changes we need to make. But the app itself is basically done.

We built the app because Final Draft hadn’t come out with its own reader. Now they have. Ours still sells remarkably well — probably because we’re the only one that works on the iPhone.

You never forget your first time, and FDX Reader really has been a remarkable experience bringing an idea to life. In celebrating FDX Reader’s first birthday, I’ll invite you to try it out if you haven’t.

(Or leave us a nice review if you’re so inclined.)

  1. Kony: February 20, 2012. Gibson: April 11, 2012. Fluke: February 29, 2012. ↩

Pricing FDX Reader

FDX Reader

After a long gestation, Final Draft has announced that their official iPad app, Final Draft Reader, will be available for sale next week.

fdx reader iconTheir app is a lot like our app, FDX Reader.

In fact, the only reason we made our app is because we needed to read Final Draft files and their app didn’t exist. So the question now is how to position our app vis-à-vis the official one.

At least on paper, their app does more than ours:

  • Production drafts (colored pages, locked pages)
  • ScriptNotes
  • Searching
  • Multi-page title pages
  • Printing with AirPrint

All of these things are useful. The question will be whether the official app does enough things better.

One advantage: Final Draft Reader should be able to exactly match page breaks (and page numbers) with the desktop version. We come very close with FDX Reader, but we’ll never hit them exactly. Page breaks aren’t part of the file, but rather an internal calculation. We don’t know Final Draft’s math. They do.

I suspect many users will be disappointed that Final Draft Reader apparently only supports .fdx files, and not the older .fdr files.

That surprised me. We don’t support .fdr either — and at least half of our support emails come from users confused why we don’t. In our case, it’s because we can’t decipher Final Draft’s old, proprietary binary format. Final Draft can, but has chosen not to.

They’re going to be answering a lot of emails on this topic. 1

Perhaps the biggest difference between our app and the official one: Final Draft’s Reader only works on the iPad. Our FDX Reader is universal and works on the iPhone (and iPod Touch) as well.

What to charge

Final Draft hasn’t announced their price yet, which has led to speculation on Twitter about how much they’ll charge, with guesses ranging from $19.99 to $49.99.

Meanwhile, we’re currently priced at $4.99. As I wrote in December, I suspect we’ll raise our price once their app comes out.

That seems counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t staying at our current price — or going even lower — pull more sales away from the official Final Draft app?

Probably, but I don’t think that’s a worthy goal. If Final Draft Reader is good, I want it to succeed.

In general, I think prices for good software — particularly specialty software like screenplay readers — should be high enough that companies can earn money developing and supporting these apps. That shouldn’t be a radical idea, but the race-to-bottom pricing of the App Store has conditioned buyers to think that anything more than 99 cents is too much.

Honestly, the only reason we can make and support FDX Reader is that I make a good living as a screenwriter. That’s what keeps the bills paid. We’re not bringing in enough money to pay Ryan what he’s worth, let alone Nima.

Psychologically, whatever price Final Draft chooses for their app will become the new baseline. If their app costs $20, ours looks like a bargain at $10. No doubt we would lose some sales, but I suspect we would earn just as much or more.

At a certain price point,2 FDX Reader becomes expensive enough that a buyer comparing the two apps might decide, “Screw it. I’ll just buy the official one.” That’s okay. I want people to choose the app that best serves their needs.

We consider FDX Reader done. We’ll continue to sell it and support it with bug fixes, but most of our energy is going towards Fountain, Bronson Watermarker, and soon-to-be-announced magic.

  1. I’ve encouraged Final Draft to come out with a free conversion utility. I’ve offered to make one — and that offer still stands. (Same with Screenwriter’s .mmsw format.) It’s difficult to build a converter for these binary formats, but to me that makes it even more essential. In 20 years, nothing will open these files. ↩
  2. What is that magic price point? If you have an opinion, let me know on Twitter: @johnaugust ↩

FDX Reader, now on iPhone

FDX Reader

FDX Reader, our app for reading Final Draft files on the iPad, is now a universal app with support for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It’s available on the App Store today. It’s a free upgrade.

We developed the iPad version of FDX Reader first because the larger screen is such a natural fit for reading screenplays. We took inspiration from readers like iBooks and Kindle, flipping virtual pages. It’s been great to see it get such a positive response, both among screenwriters and the tech press.

But in some ways, I think the iPhone version serves a more crucial need.

Up until now, reading screenplays on the iPhone has been terrible, even with PDFs. The small screen simply isn’t friendly to 8.5 x 11 sheets of 12-pt Courier. You end up pinching and zooming and straining your eyes to see anything.

While it was technically possible to read a full script on the iPhone, you’d never want to.

Now, you just might.

Our design choices were driven by the smaller screen. The iPhone is nothing like a printed script, so we felt free to break from screenplay conventions. We sliced margins. We stopped flipping pages. We picked a font that worked great at smaller sizes.

The iPhone version of FDX Reader takes its inspiration from non-book apps like Instapaper and Reeder. We focused on the text, not the area around it.

We kept two of the best features of the iPad version. The page popover lets you skip right to a given page, scrolling the text as you go. The type button gives you five choices of size — since people hold iPhones closer, you may find yourself going much smaller than you think.

And to maximize screen real estate, we dismiss the header with a center tap.

FDX Reader was made by the same team of Nima Yousefi, Ryan Nelson and me. Many thanks to all our beta testers for their suggestions and bug reports.

As with the initial FDX Reader launch, I’m sure we’ll find some unexpected situations as we expand support to additional devices.1 If something’s not working, tell us. We’ve been able to iterate so quickly — five releases in seven weeks — because our users help us.

If you’re new to FDX Reader, check out the demos and videos on the site. If you’re already a user, the new version should show up in your Updates immediately.

  1. Previous issues that have come up: A4 paper, locations files, TV act breaks, non-Final Draft .fdx files. ↩