John August

Apps

Why do people buy apps some days and not others?

Apps, Fountain, Highland

Every day, I check to see how many apps we sold the day before. Every day, I’m surprised.

Week-to-week, we tend to sell about the same number of apps, but the variability day-to-day is higher than I would have expected, and doesn’t seem to follow obvious cycles. Highland rises and falls without much relationship to the day of the week.

chart

Weekend Read has an in-app purchase allowing for an unlimited library. People aren’t buying it just for the weekend.

chart

Stranger still, the sales of Highland and Final Draft seem entwined.

chart

Why did both apps suddenly climb last week? For Highland, it might be because of my [recent blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2014/highland-as-a-bona-fide-screenwriting-app), but why would Final Draft have matched its ascent? (Still, it’s nice to see Highland overtaking Final Draft at times.)

As I said at the beginning: week-to-week, it tends to average out. And a statistician would probably be able to look at the p-value and explain that it all falls within an expected range of variability. But I still wonder why it each day is so different.

Checking batches of PDFs

Apps, Follow Up, Geek Alert

Last week, I [wondered aloud](http://2ja.co/ymstb) how I could check creator codes on a folder full of PDFs without checking them one-by-one.

[Zoë Blade](https://twitter.com/zoeblade/status/465787514427822080) wrote in with a Terminal command, but it turns out I could do it in Automator very easily. Here’s the workflow.

automator workflow

Why didn’t I try Automator first? Past experience.

Over the years, I’ve tried doing a dozen things in Automator, only to run into obstacles where it can’t do quite what I need. Often, the breakdown is conditional logic, or the need to transfer a value from one section to the next. ((Having played with other building-block environments like Scratch, I know it’s absolutely possible to do logic and variables in a drag-and-drop way, but I have a feeling Automator isn’t getting updated.))

This is the rare case where Automator does almost exactly what I want. I’ve saved this workflow as an application so I can periodically test batches of files.

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.

On error messages

Apps, Rant, Screenwriting Software

Brent Simmons has straightforward [advice on error messages](http://inessential.com/2014/05/05/error_messages):

> They should be of the form “Can’t x because of y.”

> A similar form is this: “Noun can’t x because y.” (As in “‘Downloaded.app’ can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.”)

Badly-written dialog boxes make me lose faith in an app very quickly. Here’s Final Draft 9 when you hit Next on the last element in the Reformat box.

dialog box

Oh. Okay.

It has the icon for “important warning,” but it’s nothing I need to be warned about. We’ve reached the end of the document. That’s all.

Rather than making you close a new dialog box, the app could place a notification within the Reformat box itself.

Or better yet, do nothing. If you’re at the top of a script and hit Previous, FD9 doesn’t give you any warning. This feels like the better behavior, because you can see where you are anyway.

Simmons also warns against pronouns:

> One thing error messages never say is sorry. They’re just reporting, and they respect you enough to know you want the facts, clearly expressed, and don’t need to be apologized-to by a machine.

> Also: they rarely (if ever) use the words I, me, my, you, and your.

Here’s Final Draft 9 again:

dialog waring

A better way to phrase it might be:

**Can’t delete across a page break because pages are locked.**

Getting rid of the pronoun subtly changes the tone: “It’s not your fault, it’s just how things are.”