Final Draft Go 4+

Don’t be scared of the bad reviews

I’m not a professional, so I have nothing to compare this to. I am writing my first screenplay and a friend in the industry strongly recommended Final Draft. I can’t afford the full version, so this seemed like a good idea. I was extremely hesitant after reading the bad reviews. It took me a long time to make the decision to get it.

I like it. I use it on an iPad and don’t see anything wrong with it. You can’t paste external text but I got over that quickly. Also, I don’t think you can use it on multiple devices. I tried doing “restore purchase” on my iPhone and it didn’t work. Like I said, I’m not a pro and I was very hesitant but I am overall pleased.

So many bugs

I recently updated to Final Draft Go, hoping bugs would be fixed, but now it’s much worse on my 1st gen iPad Pro. Paid for a year subscription only to find out my login wasn’t working, even though it was working on Backstage. Had to create a new account to start writing. “Find and Replace” is offscreen so I can’t see or jump between search results, which is a major pain because I use it to mark my place when hopping around the script or finding where I left off the previous day. Selecting large portions of text that go offscreen is nearly impossible due to the endpoints jittering wildly when trying to scroll up or down during selection. Even just touching text within [brackets] causes a crash, something I reported to Final Draft prior to “Go” over a year ago and they were aware of the issue back then. Dual Dialogue can’t be edited or undone without lots of undo’s, but maybe I don’t know the right way to do it, but then again why isn’t it super easy and obvious? Storing files on Google Drive doesn’t work because Final Draft still can’t see Shared Drives, another longstanding issue that Final Draft technicians blamed on Apple, which seems silly to me.

This is the leading industry software for writing scripts. It’s a shame that a program meant for typing text… TEXT! It’s just TEXT!… still doesn’t work on something as popular as an iPad. Maybe my iPad Pro is a dinosaur, but some writers are poor and my other apps actually work.

Can’t take much more of this.

Developer Response ,

Hi DavidCodeglia, sorry to hear about the issues you've been experiencing with FD Go thus far. We have documented your reports and have delivered them to the appropriate department for further research.

Regarding Dual Dialogue navigation, please see this article for assistance: https://finaldraft.my.site.com/s/article/How-do-I-create-dualcolumn-dialogue-in-the-Final-Draft-Mobile-App-for-the-iPad

Any additional issues or questions can be directed to our tech support team who is standing by Monday - Friday from 8:30 am - 5:30 pm PST at 818-906-8930, via live chat at https://www.finaldraft.com/sf/chat-support.php. or by email at https://www.finaldraft.com/contact/contact-technical-support/

Get it together, Final Draft

I’ve been in software development for over 25 years and user experience research for over 6 years, and I have never seen an app so full of bugs and usability issues as Final Draft. They should just scrap their old platform and start over completely. Today, I tried to edit a script that my writing partner sent to me where she had struck through stuff and added new stuff. (You know, basic editing).
I couldn’t see the strike throughs; it looked like she had added it instead! This renders final draft go completely useless. I had to tell her to wait until I get home where I can use my desktop version of FD….Delaying us several days. Sigh.
When I pull up my desktop version (Windows), I have to hope that she kept her script notes really short because if they go over, let’s say, 200 words then memory problems start and it’ll crash. We are writers! We have more than 200 words worth to say about things. Don’t put a limitation on the scriptnote. And if you have to then tell us what it is for God sakes! And It’s not my laptop; my laptop is a brand new gaming laptop with tons of memory.
And don’t get me started about highlighting using FD go or the Windows version. They can’t even get that right!
Someone should create a competitive scriptwriting app and put Final Draft out of its misery once and for all. FD is 100% the worst application I’ve ever dealt with, and I truly believe it’s because they don’t have competition so they don’t care.

Developer Response ,

Hi JennBouani. We aren't familiar with any issues seeing strikethroughs created in a fdx file on desktop and opened on FD Go, but we will look into the matter ASAP. If you haven't already, please notify our desktop team of the performance issues you are seeing with ScriptNotes of a certain size. I can assure you we care about your experience with both platforms.