Screenplay

Developer: Black Mana Studios
Category: Productivity
Version: 1.0
Release Date: July 2, 2009
Size: 0.3 MB
Price: $2.99
Rating 3/10

Screenplay formatting software is not a new scam. Many wannabe screenwriters have forked over two-hundred plus dollars for what is essentially a stripped-down word processor with fancy formatting. I know this because I am one of them.

So when I got tweeted a link to a screenplay application for the iPhone, my rational mind was mugged by my irrational mind, and before I knew it, it had dropped onto my iPhone. In my mind, I was already writing scenes on the fly, at the beach, at lunch, without the hideous burden of carrying a laptop.

And then I tried it.

Screenplay is an interesting idea, really. It would be nice to have a place to jot down a quick scene or two and then ship them over to my computer for editing. It's more of a novelty, because no one in their right mind would write a complete screenplay on their iPhone, but it's a cute idea with some moderate cool-app cred.

But the execution is embarrassing. First of all, it's unusably slow, even on a 3GS. You often have to wait ten seconds for your typing to catch up to you. But what is indefensible is the fact that they have disabled all of the features that make the iPhone possible to type on. There is no predictive text, no magnification, and no sign of the copy and paste the iPhone community has worked so hard to get. This makes typing incredibly hard, painful, and rife with mistakes.

So, okay, you put up with the slow typing and the misspellings and you get a functional scene on your iPhone that took you three times as long as it would have to write it out by hand, in blood. Screenplay offers integration with Celtx, which is an open-source, free, multi-platform screenwriting program -- a great idea in theory. But it doesn't work well in practice. You email yourself a txt file, but it's not easily imported into Celtx. You can sort of kind of squeeze it into Final Draft, but Screenwriter doesn't even acknowledge its existence. So you have a text file, indifferently spelled, that took you three times as long to write -- and you can't easily use it.

The initial reviews on the App Store have sent Black Mana scrambling to release an update, but they haven't announced a ship date for the new version. So there is promise on the horizon of a functional screenwriting iPhone app. Whether it is offered by Black Mana remains to be seen.