John August

Fountain

Which apps are screenwriters using?

Follow Up, Fountain, Geek Alert, Highland, Screenwriting Software

We had [57 entries](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive) for the Three Page Challenge we’re conducting on May 15th.

I wondered which apps these screenwriters were using, so I checked the metadata for each file. ((Mac Nerds: After a lot of Googling, I couldn’t find a way to display creator information for each file in a folder; I had to do them one-by-one using Finder’s Get Info. If you have a command-line trick for this, I’d love to know it.))

| **App** | **# of Entries** | **% of Total** |
|—————|————–|———–:|
| Final Draft 8 | 18 | 32% |
| (unclear) ((The (unclear) category is for PDFs that don’t have a recognizable creator. For example, some PDFs show up as being from Preview on the Mac, which is primarily a reader but can be used to paste together multiple files.)) | 7 | 12% |
| Fade In | 7 | 12% |
| Final Draft (Windows) | 6 | 11% |
| Slugline | 5 | 9% |
| Final Draft 9 | 4 | 7% |
| Screenwriter | 3 | 5% |
| Celtx | 2 | 4% |
| Final Draft 7 | 2 | 4% |
| Highland | 1 | 2% |
| TextEdit | 1 | 2% |
| Word | 1 | 2% |
| **Total** |**57** | 100% |

Adding up its various incarnations, we find that Final Draft created just over half the entries. That’s about what I would have expected.

But I find it interesting that so many users have stuck with Final Draft 8, rather than version 9. There are still holdouts with version 7 as well.

I was happy to see six dedicated screenwriting apps (Final Draft, Fade In, Slugline, Screenwriter, Celtx and Highland) among the entrants. I didn’t find any Adobe Story or WriterDuet scripts. ((If you submitted a script written in Adobe Story or WriterDuet, let me know and I’ll amend the figures.))

Writers submitting to the Three Page Challenge are, almost by definition, listeners to the Scriptnotes podcast, in which we’ve discussed Final Draft, Fade In, Slugline and Highland among other apps. I wonder to what degree that has influenced their choices.

Three Page Challengers are also generally aspiring screenwriters, rather than working pros. To me, that makes entrants more likely have recently purchased software (or web-based subscription services) than established writers, who tend to stick with what they know.

The online submission for Three Page Challenges worked well enough that we’ll keep using some version of it. In the next incarnation, we’ll ask upon submission which app the writer used.

Highland 1.7: faster, leaner, smarter

Apps, Fountain, Highland

highland iconHighland, our [award-winning screenwriting app](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) for the Mac, has a major update available in the [Mac App Store](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/highland/id499329572?mt=12).

While Highland looks largely the same on the surface, we’ve rebuilt quite a bit under the hood and added features for screenwriters who want to use Highland for all their daily writing.

Highland 1.7 — already updated to 1.7.1 — offers:

**Better pagination, particularly with dialogue.** Unlike a certain company, we don’t regard our pagination as the One True Way. But our pagination is now pretty damn great. I turned in a script last week written entirely in Highland. Without any tweaking, the pages flowed exactly how I wanted. No split sentences, no orphaned transitions.

**Markers to help you find your way in long documents.** I’ll often find myself scrolling back to look at something earlier in the script, then losing my place. So now I hit Control-M to leave a marker [[%]]. You can hop between markers with Control-Option-M. (If you’re used to markers from timeline-based apps for music or video, you’ll probably find this particularly natural.)

**Improved stability and file-handling.** Highland is much smarter (and less aggressive) about auto-saves, which were a leading cause of crashes. The version in the Mac App Store today (1.7.1) addresses launch issues some users were having with our revised code base.

**Search via integrated Find bar.** Faster, and one less window to close. If you have’t tried Find Again (⌘G), give it a shot. It’s always ready to search for the last thing you looked for.

**Better syntax highlighting.** By making it really clear what prints and what doesn’t, you can focus on your words, not the syntax.

**Much faster PDF parsing.** Highland 1.7 is better at both melting and building PDFs.

We [update Highland frequently](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/changelog), but 1.7 is a significant upgrade in actual functionality.

When people used to ask if someone could write a script in Highland, my answer was generally, “Well, you *could.* But that not really what it’s for.”

Now it is. Highland 1.7 is the first version I’ve used to write an entire script from outline to delivered draft, and I loved it. Highland is fast and lean and distraction-free.

So if you haven’t checked it out lately — or only use it as a converter — give it another look as a daily writing app.

Fountain for coders, or the joy of writing

Apps, Fountain, Geek Alert, Highland

Charles Forman, whose company OMGPOP developed Draw Something, is [writing a screenplay in Fountain](http://setpixel.com/writing/writing-a-screenplay-in-fountain/):

> I don’t work at a bank. However, I’m sure that on the first day of orientation, they teach you how to use an application written in 1999 in Visual Basic. It hasn’t been updated since 2001, it doesn’t work very well, everyone hates it, but it’s the way it is, and if you trick it, you might be able to do what you want, or wait until it’s 5 PM. It’s probably exactly what it’s like to use Final Draft.

> The joy of writing shouldn’t feel like working at a bank.

Forman offers a detailed look at writing in Fountain from the perspective of someone who’s written a lot of code. For his screenplay, he used both [Slugline](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slugline/id553754186?mt=12) and [Highland](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/highland/id499329572?mt=12), but also built his own tools based on the libraries available on GitHub.

>”How many scenes do I have?” It’s a pretty simple question. Normally, in order to do this, you have to go through the whole script and count the sluglines. I used Javascript to parse my Fountain script. I looped through the sluglines and counted them. Then I was curious about the unique locations. How many times did person A talk vs. person B? I generated some basic stats and spit it out in the console by creating a tool in 20 minutes.

He also built a tool that [generates a word cloud](http://playground.setpixel.com/wordcloud/) based on a screenplay.

Here’s Big Fish:

big-fish-wordcloud

Forman listens to the podcast, so he’s heard us discussing the possibilities of a new screenplay format. He argues that we already have it in Fountain.

> Because Fountain is pretty flexible, you could add metadata for anything you might want to extend the screenplay with. In my case, I have included storyboards. You could add metadata for the song that is playing. You could add metadata about which characters are in the scene, if its not totally clear. You could add metadata about what the purpose of a scene is. You could add anything. If I could make a small ask to the Fountain team, I would love a specific way to insert metadata. I am using notes. I’m thinking about putting curly bracket objects inside of notes going forward.

This kind of thinking is why I’m so bullish Fountain: not just what it can do today, but what it can be repurposed for in the future.

Introducing Weekend Read

Apps, FDX Reader, Fountain, Highland, News, Weekend Read

[product photo](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-blog)We have a new app. It’s called [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread). It’s for reading scripts on your iPhone.

It’s [free in the App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-blog).

Up until now, reading screenplays on an iPhone has been *terrible.* It’s all squinting and pinching.

Weekend Read takes screenplay PDFs, Final Draft and Fountain files and reformats them to look terrific on your iPhone.

Weekend Read is only for the iPhone.

Why only the iPhone, and not the iPad? Numbers.

chart

Our sophisticated market analysis revealed that there were zero good apps in this category.

###New yet familiar

If you’re acquainted with our other apps, you may be saying, “Well, it sounds like they took the ‘reader’ part of [FDX Reader](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fdx-reader/id437362569?mt=8) and the PDF-melting parts of Highland and put them together in one app.”

You’re right. That’s exactly what we did.

But we didn’t stop there. We built in search, new fonts, Dark Mode, a new page jumper, character highlighting and full-screen mode.

We added Fountain and Markdown, including images.

And because a reader needs something to read, we beefed up Dropbox support and gave users a hand-curated (and continually-updated) list of For Your Consideration scripts and Project Gutenberg titles.

The Weekend Read library holds four scripts at a time. If you choose, you can unlock the app to store hundreds. It’s a single in-app purchase.

###The present and the future

**(updated 2/12/2014)** We launched yesterday afternoon. The response has been terrific. We shipped more copies of Weekend Read in twelve hours than we did of FDX Reader in its whole life.

We didn’t nudge people to leave reviews on the App Store, but a lot of users chose to. Thank you.

A couple of common questions on Twitter:

**”Why hasn’t someone done this before?”**

We actually tried to. The hardware just wasn’t fast enough. ((The iPhone 4 is still debatably not fast enough. One advantage to making the app free is that users can decide for themselves whether the lag is acceptable.)) So we owe a huge debt to Apple and all the clever silicon engineers who make it possible to build apps like ours.

**”Can you make an Android or Kindle version of Weekend Read?”**

Unfortunately, no. Weekend Read relies on a lot of special iOS 7 stuff, and shares quite a bit of code base with Highland for Mac. We’d have to start from zero to make an Android version, and that would pull us away from all our current products.

**”Could you add notes?”**

We could. At a certain point, we had to decide where to stop for version 1.0.

Every feature you add has the potential to increase complexity in a way that compromises the purpose of the app. So I want to make sure that if we add notes, they feel just right.

**”Will this free-then-upgrade business model work?”**

We’ll see. For me, it was important that users have the chance to try Weekend Read with their own scripts. Happy users are likely to keep using Weekend Read, and many will eventually decide it’s worth it to pay for the bigger library.

But if they don’t — if they keep deleting files to stay under the limit — that’s okay too. My goal with Weekend Read was to make the experience of reading scripts on the iPhone better. Emotional profits are worth something, too.

###Speak up

We already have David Wain, Rawson Thurber and Dan Etheridge singing Weekend Read’s praises, but I’m actively seeking one more blurb.

So if you like the app, tweet a blurb with the hashtag [#WeekendRead](http://twitter.com/home?status=%23WeekendRead). Over the next few days, I’ll be picking out my favorites to add to the official [App Store description](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-blog).

To celebrate Weekend Read’s launch, we’re also offering [Highland at 50% off through Friday](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-fifty-percent). Now that you have an app for reading Fountain files, it’s time to start writing them.