John August

Apps

Highland 2 Student Edition

Apps, Highland

We offer a free full version of Highland 2 for students enrolled in university writing programs, including film schools. Over the past few months, we’ve signed up programs at the Ivy Leagues, big state schools and tiny London colleges.

Here’s how the process works:

  1. The writing professor or instructor emails us at brand@johnaugust.com.
  2. We send back instructions for signing up their students. Important: We can only sign up students with their official school email addresses (such as .edu).
  3. Once they’re in our system, we send each student an email confirmation.
  4. Confirmed students use their school email address to unlock Highland 2.

The student edition of Highland 2 is time-limited to the duration of studies. After that, it reverts to Highland 2 Basic, which has most of the same features but includes a watermark when printing or exporting to PDF.

If you’re an instructor who wants your students to have access to Highland 2, send us an email to brand@johnaugust.com. If you’re a student in a university writing program who wants to use Highland 2, send your instructor a link to this post.

Other Things Screenwriters Write

Episode - 437

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Follow Up, Highland, News, QandA, Scriptnotes, Transcribed, Treatments

John and Craig discuss the other stuff screenwriters write, from beat sheets to scriptments and everything in between. The differences are sometimes subtle, but each can have value — in the right circumstance.

After that, they dip into the mailbag (24:23) for questions on TV bibles, writing while traveling, and using “I” in titles.

Premium subscribers: stick around for a bonus segment (47:31) on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator and how its questions may be useful to screenwriters.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 2-21-2020 The transcript for this episode can be found here.

Hiring a coder

Apps, Bronson, Geek Alert, Highland, Los Angeles, Weekend Read

We’re bringing in a new person to help us update some of our older Mac and iOS apps. Maybe that’s you!

Requirements:

  • Experience with Mac and iOS development (either professionally or on your own)
  • Familiarity with web APIs
  • Proficiency in Swift
  • Ability to read (and understand) Objective-C

For the right candidate, it should be an interesting assignment. You’ll be rewriting existing Objective-C code as Swift, and bringing a 2019 perspective (and technology) to previously-solved problems. You’ll be working beside Nima Yousefi, who coded Highland,1 Weekend Read and a lot of other useful apps for writers. He’ll show you the ropes and help guide you through the process.

This is a contract gig, maybe 40 hours of work altogether, but there’s always the possibility of future projects. We’re looking for someone in Los Angeles who’s available on Tuesday and Friday afternoons for some in-person discussion.

The right person might be transitioning from another field, a college student, or someone on a gap year. You can look at this as an educational experience, intern-like, but definitely paid. If you’re a hobbyist coder considering becoming an indie app developer, it would be a good introduction. That’s how Nima got started.

Interested? Drop us a note to introduce yourself and your work. Please include links to stuff we can check out, especially Github and sample code.

  1. Fun fact: Highland 2 is almost entirely Swift, except for some very low-level stuff dealing with PDFs which goes all the way back to the original Highland. ↩

My writing setup, 2019

Apps, Follow Up, Geek Alert, Highland, Writing Process

On Twitter, @londonsquared asked for an update on my writing setup, which I’d last written about in 2016.

Honestly, very little has changed in the past three years. I still have the same computer, desk, mouse, keyboards and headphones. I print so little that today was the first time in years that we needed to buy a new toner cartridge.

My only real piece of new hardware is the iPad Pro. While I don’t love the squared edges — it feels thicker than the old ones — I find myself using the redesigned pencil all the time. On the whole, I like it a lot.

I’m hand-writing much less than I used to. Most of that is because I’ve been writing the Arlo Finch books, and it’s so many words that I just can’t keep up with paper and pen. But I also do #writesprints a lot, using Highland 2’s built-in Sprint feature.

write sprint list

I write absolutely everything in Highland 2. I’m the main beta tester.1

For other software, I’ve started using Apple Notes in place of Evernote, and switched back to OmniFocus and Mail.

Back in 2016, I wrote:

My mail setup is a mess. The right combination of rules would probably allow me to sort out the wheat from the chaff, but I haven’t invested the energy. Plus, getting it to work properly in iOS would be a big challenge. Increasingly, the iPhone is where I’m doing email triage.

If anything, it’s worse now. I set up a rule to shunt anything with the keyword “unsubscribe” to a special folder, but that’s just hiding the problem rather than addressing it.

On the whole, I’m honestly surprised I haven’t changed more things over the past three years. I’m generally an early adopter and experimenter. But until we start using goggles instead of screens, I suspect this is going to remain my basic setup.

  1. Version 2.5, coming soon, has some pretty amazing new features in it. ↩