Final Draft Go

Update: Program has not worked at all for literally 17 days. I’ve been getting periodic emails back from support, but nothing has worked. Meanwhile, I actually need to do work with the program, and I am forced to use the no longer supported FD Mobile app for now, but this is getting ridiculous. Clearly there is an issue that puts FD Go scripts in some sort of read only format, cannot do any work on a file, have tried opening several scripts, deleting and re download-loading the program, still the same issue. Meanwhile, I did get charged a monthly $10 right when out stopped working. That is not my real gripe — I would like it to work! — but I should be reimbursed for this month, I have been very very patient thus far. Please fix the bugs in this program! Hi there, I have been using FD Mobile for almost a year now, and despite its limitations and quirks (command 3 always brought up the character name that was first alphabetically, forcing my to manually touch the character icon on the screen) I have liked the program over the computer program, which I have used for decades. Today, I noticed the Final Draft Go was available and I subscribed without asking what was different between the programs first. I figured since it is newer it is being supported and revised, which it appeared FD Mobile was not. Immediately I saw the glitch with command 3 was fixed. I am having major issues with scrolling to different parts of the script — is anyone else reporting this? If I want to scroll, or slide the pagination by dragging the right side cursor the script shakes and goes nowhere, or ends up on a random page in the opposite direction I am scrolling. I am hoping that by bringing this to your attention that this is fixed asap, almost impossible to use this otherwise. Would also be helpful to know what is different about FD Go from FD Mobile, and the features this has added, not clear in the Welcome to FD Go support pages. Thanks, hoping this product is monitored and updated more than the FD Mobile was … DMS.

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.

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.