Writing Kit Blog

Last month, Stu Maschwitz and John August introduced Fountain, a new simple markup syntax for screenplays. It is very similar to Markdown in terms of readability and intuitive syntax.

Today I’m excited to announce Fountain support in Writing Kit 3.2. You can now open, edit, navigate, and preview Fountain screenplays right within the app.

To create a new screenplay, simply select ‘New Fountain Document’ when you tap on the ‘+’ button in the File Drawer.

You can choose the new monospace ‘Courier Screenplay’ font in the Settings pane to write your screenplay.

To quickly navigate between different sections and scenes, tap on the Outline button and select the desire place to scroll to.

You can preview your screenplay at any time by tapping on the eye-shaped Preview icon. The screenplay will be beautifully rendered in the Courier Screenplay font with all the features like scene headings, transitions, dialogues, etc.

This is only the beginning. If you have any feedback, feel free to contact me on Twitter (@writingkit), via email (support at getwritingkit dot com) or chime in the newly opened discussion forums (http://forums.getwritingkit.com).

As usual, please help me spread the words about Writing Kit and review the app on the App Store!

Get Writing Kit from the App Store now!

Writing Kit 3.1 In Pictures

Freshly baked GIF detailing Writing Kit 3.1 features by your truly.

Check for Updates if you haven’t done so — 3.1 is awesome!

The first thing you will notice in this 3.0 update is the brand new app icon. Under the hood, Writing Kit 3.0 is a major release that helps refine many of the app’s powerful features, make them more friendly and easier to use.

Let’s go through each of them in brief details.

Undo/Redo, Clever Return Key, Convert inline links to references

Version 3.0 finally includes proper support for undo/redo. To access this feature on your iPhone, shake your device. On iPad, swipe 2 fingers to the left to undo, and swipe to the right to redo. With this, you should no longer be afraid of making mistakes.

“Clever Return Key” is another helpful feature that eases your document editing. Writing Kit now tries to guess your intention when you tap on the Return key: If you are typing a paragraph, tapping Return will create another for you. Typing a list item, hit Return, and another list item will be appended. Same goes for block quotes and code snippets. This will be a great time-saver for Markdown users.

One more task has been added to the Markdown Source code section, which allows you to replace inline links in the current document with the reference style. Another Markdown users’ favourite, I’m sure.

Redesigned File Drawer and Quick Research

You have been asking for a better file drawer, so there you have it: The File drawer now displays full file names and supports 4 different sorting orders based on Name and Modification date. Document creation button has been moved into this screen as well. More advanced features will come in upcoming updates.

Writing Kit will no longer strips all punctuation marks from your filename. Only those truly unsupported by Dropbox are automatically removed: < > : ” / \ | ? *

In addition, the Quick Research screen has been completely revamped. You no longer need to wonder what to put in the search field; Writing Kit now suggests you what to type. Also, it gives you dozen of samples to learn how powerful this feature can be.

Readability support

Readability users now enjoy the same level of integration Instapaper users do since Writing Kit 1.0:

• Add links to Readability
• Access unread items from the Queue screen
• View the Text-only mode through the Readability mobilizer

Tweaks and bug fixes

A new button has been added to the Insert Quote/Link screen, namely “Paste from Clipboard”. It does exactly what it says on the tin: paste the current clipboard content into your currently focused text field.

Many small bugs have also been fixed, including the inability to use the “Choose Image from Library” button in the iPhone version.

It’s time to update

That’s all there to it. Update your copy of Writing Kit now and enjoy the new additions to the app. I’d really appreciate if you can rate and leave a review for Writing Kit on the App Store. And be sure to spread the words!

After roughly one week in review, Writing Kit 2.5 is now available on the App Store. This is mainly a maintenance update shipping with the following changes:

More fine-grained editor settings

The Editor Settings screen has been completely redesigned in this version. Now you can control exactly which features to be enabled in your documents: Auto-Capitalization, Auto-Correction, Check Spelling, TextExpander support.

You can also tap on the ‘Open the Settings app’ button to dive into other Advanced settings that, in the past, may have been unknown to you.

Custom themes

If you have been putting up with the boring black-text-on-white-background business, now is your chance to enjoy something more beautiful. Writing Kit 2.5 comes with 16 different themes, or rather ‘color schemes’, that helps you further customize your writing environment. Be it green-on-black, or white-on-blue, you are free to give them all a try.

iOS 5 requirements, tweaks and bug fixes

Writing Kit is powerful and very robust, but admittedly many of its features remain obscure and plain awkward to use. Writing Kit 2.5 marks the point I begin to gradually re-introduce all these powerful features, in a much more friendly way.

To that end, Writing Kit now requires iOS 5. This change will make future updates smoother and more stable.

In upcoming days, I will start work on the next major update to the app — Writing Kit 3.0 — and document the improvements on the way. Stay tuned.

If you’ve been following my Twitter account, you must have heard about Writing Kit 2.0. This is a major release and will introduce many exciting features.

Let’s get the big news out of the way first: Writing Kit 2.0 is a universal app, and current users will get it for free. Buy it now if you haven’t done so.

Here’s how the iPhone version looks like:

While the interface is much smaller than its iPad counterpart, none of the features are left out. You’re free to write your document, do quick research, browse around to look for references, share your findings, etc. Writing Kit on iPhone is THE portable “mobile researching room”, just like the version you’ve been using on iPad so far.

You ask for more font choices, and there they are: American Typewriter, Baskerville, and Helvetica Neue. Want monospace ones? Anonymous Pro, Droid Sans Mono, and Inconsolata are yours to use.

Pinch-to-change-font-size sounds cool, but its implementation was awkward and clunky - I got it. In Writing Kit 2.0, you can now control the font size more precisely using the new Smaller/Bigger buttons.

Switching between the editor and the built-in browser will be much quicker. No more superfluous fading effect.

File management module has also gone through an overhaul. Use the popular, gimmicky Pull-to-refresh gesture to sync your files with Dropbox. Manually save your document at any time with the Save document option.

Did you also notice the new word count and character count? Yes, the most requested feature has been implemented.

One more thing

Writing Kit is famous for its integration with third-party apps and services. Writing Kit 2.0 continues this tradition with support for 3 highly-popular apps:

• Terminology: Tap on any word or phrase you write or come across in the built-in browser to look it up in Terminology. Use Substitute option to find an alternative and have it replaced automatically. You can even look up terms in the Quick Research dialog.

• Things and The Hit List support: You may be surprised to hear that Send to OmniFocus is one of the most frequently used sharing options in Writing Kit. Users love researching materials in the built-in browser and send their findings to their to-do app of choice. Not everyone is a die-hard OmniFocus fan, so I’m bringing Things and The Hit List task creation to this major release.

Excited yet? Get Writing Kit from the App Store today, and spread the words!