[bonch]

I've been on a quest for the last few years to find a screenwriting app that didn't suck.

First, there's Final Draft, the market leader. People have hated Final Draft for years. The support sucks, and their major version releases are always massive bug-fests. Not to mention, the performance of the app is slow, and it doesn't feel like an OS X application. It's Carbon and doesn't use OS X's spellchecker or Cocoa typography, so the font has a grainy look to it that's hard on my eyes after I've spent three hours churning out twenty pages of script. It's just not a very friendly OS X app.

Now, when Montage was announced, I was ecstatic. It was advertised as a a fully native Cocoa screenwriting app. I (and many others) was hoping for a modern screenwriting app to blow Final Draft out of the water. But since the first beta release, I've been very disappointed. First, the interface is pretty bad and not what I was hoping for. The app wants to be everything and actually has pages for research, notes, contacts, synopsis, and more. Look, I have note-taking research apps, thank you, and they're much better than what a screenwriting app is going to give me. I also already have an outlining app that's going to do outlining much better than it ever will. It feels like there's a lack of focus in Montage.

As for the actual screenwriting part of Montage, every single beta I've tried screws up its formatting when I type a few sample scenes. It's up to beta10 now, and it's still a mess. Montage has a Script view which is the standard word processor like Final Draft, and a Scenes view, which starts off with a cool idea. You create the script scene by scene, and can name the scenes. They're displayed in pretty rounded rects. But both Script and Scenes view are a mess. In Final Draft, if I type "int," Final Draft knows I'm starting a slugline and automatically creates that element. Montage does the same thing but puts the cursor before the "t" for some reason instead of after, so when I'm typing out a slugline, I always end up with "IN. SCENE NAMET" because I'm not paying attention to the fact I'm screwing up the INT. It also uses a non-standard method of inserting parentheticals on dialogue. There are many other quirks (renaming a scene in Scene view is weird).

I started my own app, learned how to use the Cocoa text system to create multiple pages like every word processor has (you know, with the gray space between the page ends, etc.). Got far enough to have some very basic element formatting. But I just don't have the time with my crappy day job to actually go through with the whole thing. I had all these great ideas for the interface and functionality.

I want a straightforward app with a script view (no weird abstract Scene views). I want to be able to create colored markers to the left of my pages to define my own sections in the script, like markers in Logic or Cubase, but with start and end points. I want to be able to reorder these sections on a whim, mark them visible or invisible, store them in a scratch bin for later use, etc. I want an app with a notes pane like Pages, with a yellow "sticky" with a line pointing to the section of text attached to the note. I want the ability to create a mini-database of authors with contact information for scripts with multiple authors, tracking the changes each one makes. I want the ability to record all changes and revert to a previous snapshot of the script at any time and view all the changes since (like Wikipedia pages). I want to be able to export to XML. And so on.

I so dearly wish this dream app would come to exist. If not by OmniGroup, who? Does anyone know of a Mac screenwriting app that doesn't suck? :(