… and has been for a while, I’ve just discovered. Demo-able and all the rest of it, and the new features look actually potentially useful (I’m at work at the moment, not on a Mac, and not able to download a demo).
The screenshots make it look rather Mac like, and I think its Courier looks less like an escapee from Windows 3.1.
There’s something going on with scene cards, notes, organisational doodahs, but I can’t figure out from the website whether it’s still wedded to the philosophy that ‘anything starting INT. or EXT. is a new scene’. I mean clearly, it is a new scene technically, but often it’s more of a CUT TO than a whole new beat, if you see what I mean. I like to have groups of be-sluglined chunks together, to cover a given bit of plot, and have my software treat those chunks as a single scene. Like, say, Scrivener does.
The other thing I’d like it to have is a bit more tolerance for prose. I can’t be the only screenwriter who spends ages writing the story in prose before I dirty my hands with screenplay format, can I?
Did you miss my announcement about FD8 in the Announcements section? I’ll be blogging about it in a couple of days as well. It is very nice - and Scrivener imports and exports from and to FD8’s new standard file format, .fdx; Scrivener 2.0 will have even more advanced support for .fdx, allowing for all summaries to be imported as synopses and synopses to be exported as summaries etc. FD8 is a significant improvement over FD7 and it’s getting a lot of good reviews. I was lucky enough to beta test while preparing Scrivener’s .fdx support, and I was more than a little impressed… I’ll save the rest for my blog post, though! (I should add that I’m a little biased, as I’ve met and spoke with several of the FD8 folk, including their CEO, and they seem very nice people and have always been very open and friendly.)
Where you been, dude? This was a thread a couple of weeks ago (although you didn’t miss much). I upgraded right away, and while I’m still in Scrivener at this stage of my draft, FD8 does indeed seem a lot better.
To put it in movie terms, more of a reboot than a “re-imagining”. They kept everything that worked, fixed a few things that didn’t work that well, added the Scene Navigator window back in, and shined everything up. From a “typing in Final Draft” standpoint, that’s what you’re going to notice. As the industry leader (with quite a bit of distance between them and #2), they had a vested interest in not mucking with the basic functionality of FD. It still works the way it used to work, but better.
The massive (and uniformly positive) changes come under the hood, with a new file format that plays well with others. Very well, from what I can tell so far. Instead of trying to become a “story development” tool along the lines of Scrivener, they made the very good decision to Just Work with those kinds of tools. Ironically, the major improvement in FD makes it easier for me to live in Scrivener longer.
One of the biggest complaints about FD 7 was that it felt like a Windows app ported to the Mac. They remedied this in a very smart, very professional way: not content to merely look like Mac software, they actually acted like Mac software. They recognized their place in the world, and they made that place as great as they could. There’s no Microsoft “resistance is futile” thing here – they didn’t try to crush the Scriveners of the world by bloating their own software with their own crappy version of the binder. Instead, they literally encourage you to keep using the tools you love, and they made it easier for you to come home to Final Draft for your final draft.
I say well done. I am now officially a Final Draft fan again. Well worth the $79 upgrade.
Oh, and P.S. This version is STABLE. None of that 7.0 crashing nonsense.
Cheers Sean. That was exactly the sort of thing I was wondering about. I couldn’t figure out from the website how far they were taking the Navigator/Scene Cards stuff.
And yes, I missed the other thread. I have this paid work stuff, and a mortgage, and other awfulness that gets in the way of my timewasting.
I sympathise with your not keeping up with forums. Is there a way to subscribe to a feed just for a particular topic in the forum (not a post) such as Announcements? I’m sure I tried before but got a new item for every post on the forum.
I’ll be blogging about it in a couple of days as well. It is very nice - and Scrivener imports and exports from and to FD8’s new standard file format, .fdx; Scrivener 2.0 will have even more advanced support for .fdx, allowing for all summaries to be imported as synopses and synopses to be exported as summaries etc. FD8 is a significant improvement over FD7 and it’s getting a lot of good reviews. I was lucky enough to beta test while preparing Scrivener’s .fdx support, and I was more than a little impressed… I’ll save the rest for my blog post, though! (I should add that I’m a little biased, as I’ve met and spoke with several of the FD8 folk, including their CEO, and they seem very nice people and have always been very open and friendly.)
This was a thread a couple of weeks ago (although you didn’t miss much). I upgraded right away, and while I’m still in Scrivener at this stage of my draft, FD8 does indeed seem a lot better.