Final Draft is to writing screenplays what Microsoft Office is to business communications. They have quite a bit in common, those two programs; not in their features per se but that their features go far beyond just putting words to screen. In fact, Final Draft is really bad for putting words to screen.

In fairness, there are some features that really speed up the process of writing a screenplay. There are keyboard shortcuts to easily format things in the industry-standard way, and typeahead for names and previously-used scene names. Because it formats the document as you go, it knows when you are typing a character name or a scene intro, so it is able to help you along. Once you get used to that part, you can save a lot of keystrokes.

But holy crap what a dog of a text editor. To start with, it’s ugly. You have to go out of your way to make text that ugly on a Mac, and they have. The thing is fraught with display problems, and often a click on one line will yield a blinking cursor somewhere else. Then there are the times the screen is completely whacked out.

There are no excuses from the Final Draft boys on this; Jers Novel Writer also has discrete sections with predefined styling for each type of section, and it has none of those problems. It was written by a guy in a bathrobe. Of course, much of the problem with Final Draft is likely because they want to use as much of the same code as possible in the Windows and Mac versions, meaning they can’t really leverage the almost-magical text-rendering features on the Mac, and I suspect they also can’t use the best of Windows either.

[NOTE TO STEVE JOBS: Cocoa for Windows! Come on! You don’t think the Final Draft people wouldn’t be all over that in a heartbeat? Hell, they’d probably license my code. Imagine this pitch. Geek: “We want to use Cocoa.” Suit: “Why?” Geek: “It’s an amazingly innovative framework that will reduce development time and run wicked fast both on Macs and Windows with no extra effort on our part.” Got that Steve? Cocoa for Windows. It’s your Next Step toward world domination. (Insider pun accidental but embraced.)]

Of course, Final Draft has no margin notes and no database. Jer’s Novel Writer doesn’t have a notecard view of all the scenes that you can flip through and rearrange (a feature I can appreciate though I have yet to use). The closest thing to that is the automatic outline in JersNW, which I really, really, miss when working in Final Draft. fuego has pointed out in the past that the notes features of JNW would be really useful during production as well.

Final Draft is, I think, a well-named product. It has all kinds of stuff to help during production (things like pink pages – insertions and removals don’t affect surrounding page numbering, so all the people who have information that refers to a script page don’t have to go back and update everything when a scene is deleted. You can print out the page changes (each time you do you use a new color, thus ‘pink pages’), and people can update. A meeting can start with, “OK, everyone have the ochre pages?” and you know that everyone’s up to date. There’s no way I’m putting that into Jer’s Novel Writer.) That’s all cool. Final Draft is a very useful program once you have the final draft.

Another thing that Final Draft is very good at, something that almost redeems it, is that when you paste in text that is formatted with some reasonable level of consistency, the program is quite remarkably good at interpreting the text and formatting it. Hopefully the guy who wrote that code has a BMW to go with his ulcer. Now I’m working on Dark War, using Jer’s Novel Writer, laboriously typing out people’s names every time and making sure the right parts are all caps. Still far better than writing a first draft in Final Draft. At some point, when I have to share the work, I’ll past the whole mo-fo into Final Draft.

Maybe the Final Draft guys will someday remember that they are selling software for writing a screenplay, not just managing one. Maybe it’s time for Jer’s Screenplay Writer.

Sweet!

Thanks!

I was in the Secret Labs this morning, floating aimlessly through the glossy, high-tech warren of tunnels and chambers drilled through the rock and metal of Asteroid 2029 as it orbits the distant sun here in this quiet Prague neighborhood, when I made the decision.

“Ship it,” I said to myself, and Jer’s Novel Writer 1.0 was released to the world.

I’ve been working on this thing for a few years, now. One of the reasons it took so long to get to 1.0 is because along the way the growing body of users has been full of ideas, suggestions, and constructive criticism. Some of my favorite features were things I would never have thought of on my own. The long gestation period means that 1.0 is way, way cooler than I imagined it would be when I started out.

Still, it’s about stinkin’ time. One thing that makes version 1.0 different than just another incrementally better beta release is that this one is technically not free. Users have been able to pay voluntarily for a while, and it’s really cool when I get the “You’ve been paid!” message. It will be interesting to see if people’s behavior changes as all. I estimate that I have already earned more than ten cents per hour for coding this thing  (if you don’t count classes, hardware, or any other expenses — let’s not think about that).

It would be sweet to sell enough copies to live off the proceeds, but that seems unlikely, even living here. Maybe if I move to Ukraine…

You know what would be even sweeter? Some day I want to be sitting somewhere in the world, writing my next best-seller when someone looks over my shoulder and says, “Hey, Jer’s Novel Writer! I use that too!” That would be almost as cool as happening upon someone reading a book I wrote.

That’s all the future, however. Today is about hitting a milestone, a big event that could affect my life. Today is 1.0 day. (It’s also Over-Easy Day. Dang, already a doubled-up day. What are the odds?)

Sweet!

Thanks!

It’s a mixed blessing, having a word processor that you wrote yourself. On the one hand, you stand a pretty good chance of having a tool that works the way you do. As I mentioned previously, for me that means having a tool that helps me not forget stuff, and not worry about the details until it’s time to worry about them.

There is a downside. This morning I was thinking that I would much rather write Feeding the Eels episodes using Jer’s Novel Writer than this here blogging software. It’s not a big deal, I can write it there and paste it in over here. The thing is that Eels has special formatting, and setting all that up in the blog software is a pain. When I paste the stuff in formatted the way I want it, the blog software produces some pretty ugly markup that I then feel compelled to repair. Things are better in the new version, but still not as easy as it should be.

What I needed was an XHTML export feature in JersNW. That way all the correct markup will be there already, neatly done my way, and I can paste it in as source code. The blog software can just leave it alone. (Whether it actually will leave the code alone has yet to be demonstrated.) I’d been mulling how to implement that feature for a while now, and well, today was the day. Now JersNW has XHTML export. As JersNW’s biggest customer, the developer really hops to it when I want a feature.

The feature is mostly there, anyway. It has all I need for Eels, but now that the feature is there I have to make it so it’s useful to everyone else, also. Darn those other customers.

Meanwhile, I didn’t actually get any writing done today, and I probably won’t tomorrow as I make the export feature versatile enough for other users. I tried to get a bit of writing in this evening but my head is entirely in the land of logic right now. I would look at the page and I didn’t see words, I saw a word processor. That’s the big downside. I’ve got a confrontation between Felix and Schmidt, a battle of wits and subtle words (Schmidt is an underdog but don’t count him out), and all I can think about is overlapping <span> tags. Then I caught a margin note’s anchor shifting, and that was it.

On top of that, it’s not really a good business policy to add a major feature mere days before the big rollout of version 1.0. But there you have it. That’s how things work here at the Hut.

Sweet!

Thanks!

Every once in a while I get a special treat in my mailbox — I will receive a message notifying me that someone has voluntarily paid for Jer’s Novel Writer. (My favorites are when someone with the ability to turn a nice phrase decides to haggle.) In a world of software pirates, there is another sort of person, one who pays for the things that help them for no other reason than it is the right thing to do. I think in general software companies would do a lot better if they used persuasion and value rather than coercion to reduce piracy. I also think people are more willing to pay a company that is recognizably human. I couldn’t change the way I interact with my users even if I wanted to, but I think people respond to it well. I am, quite obviously, just a guy who couldn’t find a word processor that was about writing. (In the intervening years that has changed, and there are a couple of other strong candidates as well.) I have also set up a system where I make people happy by stealing their ideas (‘paying attention to their suggestions’, I call it in official Hut correspondences).

But I digress. (You couldn’t tell it was a digression because I actually started on a course tangential to the point I set out to write. Yes, I’m that talented. But, once more, I digress.) I was enjoying a Saturday breakfast with fuego and MaK, and I began to wonder how much I’ve made so far from JersNW on an hourly basis. It’s impossible to come up with any sort of accurate assessment of how many hours I’ve put into it; there are weeks of furious development with pauses only to sleep, followed by a month without much time invested at all. I did some wild-ass guessing, though, and the numbers came out quite a bit higher than I expected. Its even possible I’ve now earned more than five cents an hour for my efforts, if you don’t count expenses like geek school and caffeinated beverages. If you count tea costs, I have a long, long way to go to break even.

Of course, that hourly rate will continue to climb, which is good, because it takes a lot of juice to run the antigravity generators that keep the Secret Laboratory complex floating in its sky city, the sun glinting off the great glass climate dome, while air cars swirl about, drifting serenely between the clouds over this quiet Prague neighborhood. Plus, anything that buys me a little more time in this life I’ve made for myself, a little more time to build a career as a writer, is welcome. Obviously, though, if it was about money I would not have left my day job. I think one of the reasons people are willing to pay for the software is that they know I’m in for something other than money. You know what that thing is? It’s fun. I enjoy working on the code, making it beautiful inside and out, and I enjoy watching the software evolve and change into something I never imagined at first. I enjoy learning new techniques and delving into new areas of the programming framework. I enjoy writing the dialog box text, and I try to make that fun, too. I think when a creator of anything is having fun, be it a movie or a spacecraft or a computer program, it shows in the product. Stodgy business software isn’t stodgy because the customers demand it be that way, rather because the creators are incapable making it any other way. Software for drones by drones.

Maybe if the big software companies got their own sky cities the resulting increase in morale would show in their products. I wonder how high this thing can go…

Sweet!

Thanks!

Other than myself, 999 people (not counting the backlog) have requested keys to turn off the gentle nagging in Jer’s Novel Writer. That’s not a huge deal, as keys are free until release 1.0 (other developers have delivered far less for a 1.0 release — remember Windows 1.0? I didn’t think so — but I want it to be right). But still, out there are 1000 people and counting who have been excited enough about the software to request their very own key.

Key 1000 was, completely without my planning it that way, a haggle. Although you don’t have to pay for a key, you still can, and the key you get will last much longer. That’s cool, but the same price doesn’t work for everyone. I set a very reasonable price for the software, but out there are students and teachers and other folk generally working to make the world better and people like that deserve a break. Rather than make a whole set of proces for different circumstances, I recognized that my market was writers. You want a discount? Tell me why you deserve one. Style counts.

Actually, key 1000 wasn’t so much a haggle as a barter. In exchange for a software key that will last a long, long, time, I get a bound galley of his first novel. No two ways about it, I win. From his emails I know I will like the author’s work. You can just tell that sometimes. Some folks have a way with words. Those are the people who can score a discount on Jer’s Novel Writer.

Sweet!

Thanks!