John August

Highland

Highland wins 2013 Macworld Eddy

Apps, Highland

The editors of Macworld named Highland one of the [best products of 2013](http://www.macworld.com/article/2071020/macworld-editors-choice-awards-the-best-products-of-2013.html?page=2):

> Writing is hard. Writing a script or screenplay can be harder. That’s why we like Highland, Quote-Unquote Apps’ minimalistic $20 screenwriting tool. Highland offers writers a clean, unadorned space to work on their screenplay.

> All Highland files are saved as plain text, allowing you to open them in just about any program on your Mac, PC, or iOS device. You can even import your PDFs and Final Draft files into the app for easy editing, and then export them back into their original formats for further work.

> Certainly for those in the film industry, this app is more than worth its price.

Many thanks to the editors of Macworld, and big congratulations to the Quote-Unquote apps team for their hard work on Highland.

Nima Yousefi has built and rebuilt Highland’s parsing engine a dozen times, taking it from impressive to magical to so-good-you-forget-it’s-difficult. (The next build is even better.)

Ryan Nelson has designed and tweaked our graphics down to the pixel. Minimalism is hard, because there’s nothing to hide behind.

Stuart Friedel keeps tabs on sales figures and industry chatter. He and I use the app daily, so it’s often our observations and annoyances that set the agenda.

I was excited to see so many other apps I love on the list of Eddy winners, incluing 1Password, Badland, Bartender, Capo, Drafts 3, Fantastical 2 for iPhone, Gone Home (Craig’s One Cool Thing), IFTTT, Launch Center Pro, and nvAlt.

For 2014, we’ll be keeping up development of Highland while introducing a new app that works related magic for folks who deal with screenplays.

In the meantime, you can [check out Highland](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/blog-eddy) on the Mac App Store.

Writing in Fountain on the iPad, using Editorial

Apps, Fountain, Geek Alert, Highland

[Editorial](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/editorial/id673907758?mt=8) is one of the slickest text editors for the iPad, and thanks to some clever Python scripting, it can now show [previews of Fountain scripts](http://editorial-app.appspot.com/workflow/5215636485570560/diZz8hHAW1c):

fountain preview

The Fountain preview is not perfect. I noticed parentheticals didn’t find the right margins and other bits of minor weirdness. But this workflow demonstrates one of the big advantages of Fountain’s plain-text heritage: you can adapt existing tools to work with it.

Fountain-centric iPad apps are coming, but until then there are no shortage of great text editors for iOS, so it’s worth experimenting. Anything you write in Fountain can easily be transformed into a PDF by apps like [Highland](http://taps.io/JdQA) or [Slugline](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slugline/id553754186?mt=12).

Shift-return, Highland’s little helper

Highland

This weekend, Neil Cross (creator of [Luther](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474684/)) emailed me with a feature request:

> I love Fountain in general and Highland in particular. I’d live there all-but permanently, but for one issue: I’m a very fast but very poor two-fingered typist. One of my worst habits is accidentally hitting the CAPS LOCK key — so I disable it.

> I wonder if there’s any chance the Fountain syntax could incorporate a FORCE CHARACTER instruction, the way it currently incorporates FORCE SCENE HEADING?

> I can’t be the only clumsy typist in the world for whom this would be a godsend.

I started to brainstorm syntax changes and work-arounds, until I realized we’d already built a solution into Highland: shift-return.

highland-shift-return

At the end of a line, if you hit shift-return rather than just return, you’ll make the entire line uppercase. It’s useful for character names, scene headings and transitions.

Why I like writing in Fountain

Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

For the past 18 months, I’ve been doing all my new writing in Fountain rather than a heavyweight screenwriting app like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter.

I love working in Fountain so much that I made a screencast to explain [why it’s better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lElhyw3WGxo):

For geek types, it’s easy to say that Fountain is [like Markdown for screenplays](http://fountain.io/faq). But that doesn’t explain why it’s better for day-to-day writing, so in this screencast I tried to show why a screenwriter might use a Fountain-based app instead of Final Draft or one of the other apps from the 1990s.

In the video, you’ll see that I’m including several comparatively new applications in this category of old-style apps. They may be recent, but programs like Fade In and Adobe Story work largely same way word processors did back when Will Smith was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They’re essentially Microsoft Word with custom style sheets. They don’t take advantage of how much faster computers have gotten, or the special things you can do when you’re handling structured text like screenplays.

The old apps were built for printing scripts from stand-alone computers. The new apps are built for the web, for phones and tablets, for everything that’s coming. It’s the flexibility and extensibility of Fountain that helps make new things possible.

As always, you can find out more info about Fountain at [Fountain.io](http://fountain.io.), including full explanation of the syntax and apps that have particularly good support for it.

You can get Highland, the app I used for this demo, from the [Mac App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/fountain-screencast).

Over this Thanksgiving break, why not give Fountain a try?