Arc Studio Screenwriting

I've already been using Arc for years, and was surprised when I saw some bad reveiews here, so I wanted to leave one to set the record straight. This is is the best screenwriting software out there, and I have tried all of them. I am writing feature film screenplays so keep that in mind for this review. It's not just a phone app, it's also has iPad, Mac, and web browser versions. I am primarily using the iPad and Mac versions. I was looking for something with google docs like multi-user functionality, and it has that, as well as a beautiful minimal UI so I can focus on writing. I also really like the versioning and branching features, helps you keep track of what you did when, and who did what (like github but for screenwriting, it's awesome). Another feature I love is the beat sheet, you can write out your beats and then fill in the script. But you can also drag and drop the beats around and it will move the script to follow. The developer is also super responsive to bug reports and feature requests, and they have a support site where you can vote and request features/bug fixes. But overall I am just so impressed by Arc Studio. Like I said, tried em' all, this is the best.

The PRO version of this software is nearly $100 bucks. I’ve paid that twice now. But into my second year, the iPhone version is still a buggy unpredictable mess:Making selections in the scene context menu is frustrating, doesn’t always work as expected. Tapping the little running man icon doesn’t always successfully activate this menu, making context selection a cat and mouse chore. The settings menu is larger than the frame, making buttons and text fall off the edges of the screen, and everytime I activate it, it shows up in different places on screen, making it very difficult to navigate and work with. Turning on page line breaks produces a very strange result: page lengths are not consistent, making some pages much much longer than others… and after a few pages, the page line breaks just stop appearing altogether. ALSO, turning on the page line breaks feature introduces a bug, where after a certain point in your writing, text falls below the fold on screen, making it impossible to continue writing. Turning this feature OFF, restores my ability to continue writing, but leaves me with very large irregular gaps in my text. I’m bummed the beat outliner, character and location building features are not included in this version of the software. For a $100 “Pro” version of the software I should have the complete set of features across devices.Seriously, you guys have quite a bit of work to do to make this package more usable and stable.

Let me start off by saying this app was absolutely my favorite app for screen writing I was using the free version that apparently is only a “7 day fee trail “( I had it free for much longer and never had any issues with it ). Now, I’m not really sure what they did to this app or what the changed when they got greedy and wanted to start charging you $70 a year for an app that was free for all and now all of a sudden has flaws and bugs and glitches up the A. Whatever you guys did to the app on the current update please change it back. I’m constantly having issues every 3-4 lines. I can’t use half the features on the app because they’re either the $90 a year version or they are completely unusable because of glitches. I understand having to pay for the app since it’s possibly become more popular and I forked out the money since the browser version is absolutely awful and useless, I’m seriously dissatisfied with my new experience in an app I used to cherish and love. It made writing so easy and seamless and now I find myself having to stop every 5-10 minutes to figure out a glitch or bug or the app completely crashes. Shame on you guys for messing this app up completely. I hope to see further improvements as I still am forced to use the software after spending $70 on it lol.