Slugline 1.1.0 is now available on the Mac App Store.
Yes, it's been a while since our last update. We've been busy working on some very cool long-term projects, including some exciting new features for Slugline, but this update fixes a couple of nasty bugs that we just recently cracked.
You can read the full list of new fixes and features on the Slugline Blog.
If you have yet to try Slugline, here's a brief tutorial showing how simple it can be to write a screenplay in an app with no buttons:
Two years ago, I was the very first presenter at the Bay Area Lightroom User Group. Tuesday, January 27, I'm returning to Adobe's San Francisco offices, Iron Chef style! Adobe's Benjamin Warde explains:
Here's how it will work: anyone who wishes may submit a photo ahead of time (details below). I will collect the photos - Stu will not see any of the photos until he's standing up in front of us all at the user group meeting.
Then, having just seen the photos for the very first time, he'll flex his Develop module skills by making each of them look as awesome as possible, as quickly as possible. Depending on how many photos we get we may also impose a per-photo time limit on Stu.
(Ben gets to write stuff like that about me because we've known each other since Kindergarten.)
See the complete details here. Please only submit an image if you plan on attending. And please do attend! I might include a sneak peek at some future Prolost Lightroom presets.
A few years ago, I started a long-form writing project. Some might call it a “book,” but “books” need to get finished, and this, clearly, was not such a project — otherwise you’d have heard of it.
I began the project in Scrivener, an app with a devoted following of which I was a member. Incredibly powerful, and with a multi-document, structured approach designed specifically for book writing, it seemed the perfect choice.
Scrivener saves its own file format, called .scriv, which is essentially a folder full of files. The text itself is stored in multiple RTF files, which is an open format, but the writer never sees these files, and the glue that binds them together is understood only by Scrivener.
Back in 2011, iOS writing apps couldn’t work with RTF, so if you wanted to write on your iPhone or iPad, you need to use plain text. The lovely folks who make Scrivener knew that we wanted to edit our “long-form writing projects” (sticking with that) on the go, so they created what I’ve come to realize is the customary Scrivener solution to the problem: A huge amount of clever engineering, and an inscrutable, tutorial-requiring user interface for automatically dumping your work to text files each time you close the project. These text files are examined every time the project is opened, and any changes are synced into the project. Only the differences are edited in, so any non-plain-text-compatible formatting, such as italics and headings, remains unclobbered—as long as it isn’t in the paragraph you edited remotely.
I did this for a while, but you’ll never guess what happened. I started clobbering a lot of italics. Every time I opened Scrivener, I would compulsively examine all the synced-in changes, and recreate any special formatting that had been lost. It was distracting and counterproductive. I was working to support the system, instead of the other way around.
I became so frustrated with this that I decided to abandon the robust support structure of Scrivener, and try a sip of the Apple Kool-Aid. I had iWork on my iPad and my Mac, so I moved my document to Pages. This process kept me busy with formatting fixes, but eventually I had all my words in one .pages file. In early 2011 there was no iCloud document syncing, but I imagined I’d be OK with emailing the document back and forth to myself. In 2011.
I immediately experienced problems. First, Pages is a bizarre experience on iOS. As a WYSIWYG app, it must show you the correct fonts and paragraph widths. This means that your text cannot be displayed in a typeface and size optimized for a smaller device, which makes for an awkward user experience involving awful things like side-scrolling.
Then I began to notice problems with the writing I’d been doing on the iPad. On the Mac, Pages would automatically convert my straight quotes to curly as I typed. The iPad version did not do this. As you can imagine, this meant that I’d obsessively correct the iPad quotes to curly, manually, every time I opened the file on the Mac. Because writing.
Worse still, iOS would convert my document to a variation of the Pages format suffixed .pages-tef. These files broke some things from regular .pages files. If you like horror stories, you can read all about these conflicts here and here.
At this point I decided that writing a long-form project might not be for me. I’m not kidding.
In February 2010, Scrivener’s Keith Blount wrote 8,100 words about why they wouldn’t be creating an iPad version.
Scaling Scrivener down... would be a massive feat in itself. It may sound simple – just do less! But it doesn’t work like that. And would a scaled-down version of Scrivener even be Scrivener?
But in December 2011, he announced that they would be creating Scrivener for iPad, and even showed a screenshot. Some bumps in the road later, they began to reveal that Scrivener for iPad wouldn’t be scaled-down much at all.
The most recent update on their blog indicates that they hope to release Scrivener for iPad sometime in 2015.
I don’t mean to pick on Scrivener. In fact, I am beyond grateful to Keith for being so open with his team’s trials and tribulations. I certainly learned a lot from his experiences. The most cautionary part of it all for me was that Keith felt that a stripped-down version of Scrivener would not fly with his users, on any platform. It seemed to me that his own answer to the question he posed in 2010 was: no, a scaled-down version of Scrivener would not be Scrivener.
In the screenwriting world, Final Draft seemed to make the same decision. After exhaustively poling their users about what they’d be willing to give up in a mobile version of their controversial app, the results came back decisively: we want it all. In my review, I called the result “10 pounds of app in a 1.5-pound bag.” I’ve never used it since.
Who would have thought that simple words on a page would be so painful to move from platform to platform, app to app, device to device? Proprietary file formats are inherently complex. Just read poor Keith’s description of how hard it is to safely sync a Scrivener file between Mac and iOS. Or John August’s hoop-jumping to rescue old Final Draft files.
Apple is never one to be held prisoner, even by their own past. Their solution to break free of the Mac/iOS syncing problems they created for themselves with iWork was to dumb down the capabilities of the Mac apps to match those of the iOS versions, and break compatibility with older files.
Proprietary file formats make writing suck.
Recently, I dusted off that Pages file and exported it as plain text. I pasted that into smaller .txt files, one for each Chapter. These files were actually created for me by Leanpub, a service that publishes long-form... oh, hell, it publishes books. It’s also free to use however you like, even without using its publishing service. It has an online engine that converts plain-text to popular eBook formats like .epub and .mobi, and the syntax you use for things like italics and links is, of course, Markdown.
These Markdown files can be edited anywhere, on any device. You’ll never corrupt or break them. They are future-proof, and infinitely portable. And they sync like butter.
Although I remain a huge fan of Byword for plain text writing on Mac, it does emphasize a single-document model. Other apps exist that strive to bring that scrivener-like multi-document navigation to plain text. My first thought was to try Ulysses III for this, but its document handling model confused me and added extra characters to my files, breaking the Leanpub export process.
Then I remembered Write. It allows you to add a folder to its left-hand sidebar, and then navigate the contents. Unlike Ulysses, it doesn’t try to hide the plain text experience from you. It’s perfect for my needs, and it’s $10.
But my point here is not that Write for Mac is the perfect writing tool. My point is that the agnostic nature of text files allowed me to find the perfect writing tool for me, for this project, today. In the future, Write may be no more, but another app will take its place, and I won't have to reformat a thing.
I have a screenwriter friend who graciously turned down my offer of a free copy of Slugline.
He’s perfectly happy in Final Draft. He knows it’s not great, but that doesn’t bother him. He’s “not very technical.” Slugline solves two problems he doesn’t have: he’s not prone to distraction, and he’s not overly annoyed by Final Draft.
Until last week, that is, when he spent an entire day troubleshooting a corrupted Final Draft file.
When we launched Slugline, I wrote a blog post there called The Right Amount of Simple. The basic idea is that WYSIWYG writing apps present a simple facade that requires a surprisingly complex back end — and that complexity can bite you in numerous ways, adding cognitive load at best, and at worst, suddenly creating a user experience so complex that it can actually stop you from working.
Maybe it’s a new version of your favorite writing app that won’t open your six-year-old files. Maybe it’s a years-long delay in a compatible mobile app. Maybe it’s a corrupted file.
What I’ve observed is that “not very technical” people wind up going through incredibly technical contortions to protect the illusion of simplicity feigned by WYSIWYG writing apps. Just ask my buddy about peeling his writings out of a malformed XML dump.
Now that my long-form writing project is in simple, plain text files that I can edit anywhere, I once again feel joy every time I open it.
Maybe I’ll even finish it one of these days.
It only happens once a year, and today's the day! Everything at Red Giant is 40% off.
That means Color Suite, with Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista, Mojo, Cosmo and Denoiser is just $360, marked down from $599.
Shooter Suite, featuring the indispensable PluralEyes and the awesome new Offload, is just $240, usually $399.
The same great deal applies to the Effects Suite and Trapcode Suite of course.
There's never a better time to get Magic Bullet. And it's a great time to be using Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista, with the powerful new mask tracking features in After Effects and Premiere. Powerful, intuitive color correction, right in the app you're already using.
Here’s a question that literally no one has ever asked, ever:
There’s no need to ask that question, because of course you do. Everyone has an opinion about the lens flares in Star Trek. Or the casting of a new superhero movie. Or, well, anything having to do with movies.
Certainly about the new Star Wars teaser.
We’re all experts on movies. We love them, we freeze-frame them, and we react to them. And our reactions are our opinions, and our opinions are us. So we feel that they are important.
And we are wrong.
Clinton Torres and I have regular meetings to discuss the development of our app, Slugline. We meet at a bar, because Slugline is a screenwriting app. This bar has a great menu of unique cocktails. Some are good, some are great, and all of them are interesting.
I have never ordered anything at this bar that wasn’t on the menu, because what I like about this bar are the opinions of its proprietors. I like that they play interesting movies on the flatscreens instead of sports (once they had The Phantom Menace and Sin City going at the same time, which made me feel quite at home). I like that they serve both fried chicken and bone marrow brûlée. When they add a new drink to the menu, I can’t wait to try it. Because I find their opinions interesting.
Sometimes I overhear patrons around me ordering their drinks. One gentleman ordered a Long Island Iced Tea, which is less of a cocktail than a fraternity hazing ritual. Another asked for a Death in the Afternoon, and then, when the bartender had a moment’s hesitation, reveled in explaining exactly how to make it. A woman next to me described the margarita she wanted in such detail that I thought she might just hop over the bar and start mixing it herself.
Starbucks has built an entire business on people’s love affair with their own opinions. You would never want the employees of a Starbucks to weigh in on what drink might suit you. There, you are the boss, with your lengthy half-this, number-of-pumps-that screed that has been lampooned so many times that it now surprises me how often I witness it performed in earnest.
If you haven’t tried it, there is an immense freedom and joy in going to a coffee shop where you order a cappuccino by saying the word “cappuccino,” and nothing else except “please.” But that’s just my opinion.
We are experts on what kind of warm pint of milk and sugar with a tiny drop of robot-prepared coffee at the bottom we like. We are experts at what kind of self-flagellating college memory of a “drink” suits us best. And we are all experts on movies.
But there’s a big problem with that last one:
You can’t “send the movie back” and ask for it to be hotter, or colder, or for Wonder Woman to be played by someone else, or for Loki to have horns on his helmet, or not. Or for fewer lens flares, or a less spherical droid, or a differently-configured made-up laser sword. The movie is the movie, and it’s up to you to enjoy it, or not. A movie is an opinion. If you’re not open to that, don’t go.
J.J. Abrams chose to have a metric assload of lens flares in Star Trek. It was something he wanted to try. He had an idea, and he went for it.
And let me be clear: It’s fine to not like it. That’s your reaction, and it’s always valid.
It’s your opinion that means nothing.
Above, I tried to trick you by saying “our reactions are our opinions,” but by my definition, that’s not true. You’re expressing your reaction when you say “I don’t like the lens flares.” You’re expressing your opinion when you say “there were too many lens flares.” See the difference?
There were exactly the right number of lens flares in Star Trek, because Abrams put in exactly as many as he wanted. And when he put fewer in Star Trek: Into Darkness, that was right too — because it was the opinion of the filmmaker that a movie where we go “into darkness” might not be as bright as the previous chapter.
If you’re still having a hard time seeing my distinction between reactions and opinions, here’s a helpful rule of thumb. Your reaction doesn’t require anyone else to be wrong.
Recently, J.J. said in an interview that he looks back at his use of lens flares in Star Trek as a bit excessive. The internet (not you, the other internet) jumped all over this. “I’m vindicated!” said The Internet, “J.J. finally admitted that I was right all along about the flares!”
No. That’s not what happened. What happened is that a creative, cool guy tried something fun in a big movie, and now he’s made a few more movies, and he’s tried other things in those, and he looks back at one of his experiments and thinks, “wow, I sure did have a lot of fun with that, maybe even a bit too much by my current standards.” His current standards, which are different than they were a few years ago.
Because his opinion changed.
Smart, cool, creative people change their opinions. It’s necessary that they do so, because they sell their opinions for a living, and they need new material to stay in business. Smart, cool, creative people know that their opinions are not them. Their opinions are a snapshot of them, at a particular time, under a particular set of circumstances.
The “you” that matters is not your opinion. What matters is the “you” that can thoughtfully generate an independent opinion. And that you changes over time. Opinions that don’t change when presented with new circumstances are not opinions, they’re dogma. That bar in Emeryville? Its menu is now completely different from when Clinton and I first started meeting there. Yet it’s unmistakably the same bar.
Here’s a universal characteristic of people who have figured this out: They celebrate the opinions of others, even when they don’t agree with them. They try a new dish, or a new cocktail, or watch a new film, with eager anticipation to be exposed to something new — something that challenges, instead of panders to, their expectations.
They understand that opinions matter when creating, but only reactions have value when partaking. Your opinion about the lens flares in Star Trek can have value — but only if you use it to inform something you create.
There’s not a film I can watch where the director will have had all the same opinions as I might have. Consequently, if I’m ever to enjoy any movie, I have to switch my mindset from filmmaker to audience. And as an audience, I want to be like a customer of Jiro’s sushi. Don’t show me a menu. Don’t ask what I like. Just make me something great.
Would I have done things differently than J.J in the Star Wars teaser? Sure. Does that mean I can’t enjoy it? Quite the contrary. After working my butt off on a few Star Wars movies (and one Star Trek) I’m so excited to be just one of the crowd — watching and reacting to the new Star Wars.
And nothing would be more boring than if it perfectly met every one of my expectations.
Life is short, and experiences are all we get. So have them, embrace them, even actively try to enjoy them. Seek out ones that challenge you. Then, later, by all means, consider both your reaction, and, yes, even your opinion about those experiences.
And here’s a crazy thought. At least for a little while, try keeping it to yourself. The crowd is a bad author. So just sit back, relax, and enjoy the glorious luxury of experiencing someone else’s opinion.
But do keep your opinions handy, because you'll need them when it comes time to make something of your own.
