Final Draft is basically the de facto screenwriting software, but it has a lot of problems. It's slow, buggy and has an interface straight out of 1996. It's also costly and given how skint most screenwriters are I don't think it's a very healthy monopoly.
So what's the alternative? There's stuff like Adobe Story, Celtx, Fadein and Highland - which are pretty good - but no real viable web-based alternatives. I wanted something I could stick on my server and use everywhere (laptop/phone/tablet etc.)
This is my attempt at writing a minimalist, open source, web-based app that will hopefully let me write quicker and with fewer distractions.
In the long term, I'd like to build in collaborative Google Docs-esque editing and complete Final Draft file format support. But that's a long way off!
It's nowhere near usable yet but it does kind of work! Ish!
Cheers
D
Currently working:
- Sexy dark interface that's easy on the eye.
- All of the basic elements from Final Draft are implemented and kind of work
- Shoddy keyboard interface - hit tab to switch element type, hit enter to create new elements.
- Save/load projects
- "Intelligent" guesses about which element you want to use next. For example, if you have two chunks of dialogue in a row, we assume that's a conversation between characters and your next element will automatically be a character element.
- Autocorrect - character names are automatically corrected to upper case in action and general elements
- Quick character switching/autosuggest (press the ALT key from any dialogue or character block)
- Conversation detection - automatically picks likely character names if characters seem to be in a conversation
- Several exciting, usability-crippling bugs
Near future:
- Page breaking, automatic (CONT'D)s etc
- PDF rendering (maybe with pdf.js?)
- Zoom
- Autocomplete for character names & locations
File load functionality (!)- Some kind of login system so I can work on scripts with my writing partner without faffing around sending emails to each other at 5am
Someday:
- Live collaborative Google Docsish editing
- Multiple formatting styles (currently it's just a knockoff of the Final Draft default)
- Annotations/highlighting
- Scene summaries and other bullshit like that
