Highland 2 is a Markdown and Fountain text editor written entirely in Swift. From novels to screenplays to blog posts, Highland 2 makes it easy to turn plain text into beautifully formatted PDFs.
Unique features of the app include:
The Bin. Users can drag and drop text snippets in and out of the sidebar.
Gender Analysis of Screenplays. Because character dialogue is explicit in Fountain documents, the app parses the document and extracts character and dialogue information, and presents it to the user so they can mark characters as male or female, and then calculates the percent of dialogue for each gender. We opted to let users manually set genders, rather than try and intuit them based on a dictionary of names, to prevent misattribution of genders and give users control over which characters they want to use to see the gender breakdown. This feature was written about by the New York Times.
A custom Markdown-flavor focused on PDF generation. Markdown was created to simplify the generation of HTML, but it’s become the go-to plain text formatting for all kinds of writing. Highland flavored Markdown adds markup — much from Fountain — to make it easier to format text meant to be printed. These features include page breaks, forced alignment, and tables. We also add notes and synopses, to give users the ability to add useful metadata to their documents.
Write Sprints. Set a timer for a set amount of time and start writing. Highland 2 will keep track of all the work you do across all documents and will give you the final changed word count at the end of the Sprint.
Themes. Highland 2 includes a set of light and dark themes, and users are able to generate custom themes using a web interface.
The app is available as a free download in the Mac App Store, with a Pro unlock available via in-app purchase.
Weekend Read gives users the power to read screenplays on the iPad and iPhone. It was built in Objective-C, with support for iCloud document syncing, and a Ruby on Rails backend.
Because screenplay formatting uses indented dialogue, viewing raw screenplay PDFs can be less than stellar on the iPad, and outright unreasonable on the iPhone. Weekend Read uses the screenplay PDF parser I built for Highland and formats it for the screen, giving the user the power to change text font and size.
We rely on iCloud to give users the ability to sync files between devices, including access to iCloud Drive on the Mac.
To help users find scripts, we built a For Your Consideration feature that lets users access a rotating list of screenplays that we curate. We built a Ruby on Rails backend to power this feature, along with a custom admin backend to allow anyone on the team to manage the library.
Weekend Read is available as a free download from the App Store.
Bronson Watermarker 2 is a PDF batch watermarking app for macOS.
Unlike most batch watermarkers, which add the same watermark to multiple documents, Bronson takes a single document and creates many documents each with their own specific watermark from a list of names you give it. This is important for securely sending the same document to multiple people, like sending a movie script auditioning actors or sending a business report to the entire sales team.
Users can choose the style of watermark, where it’s printed, and its font and color. We include advanced features like adding PDF password protection, adding noise, or converting each page of the PDF to an image, to make it harder to extract the text out of the PDF.
Assembler is a simple macOS app to concatenate multiple plain text files together.
Fountain is a plain text markup language for screenplays. Inspired by Markdown, Fountain was developed in collaboration with John August and Stu Mashcowitz.
I built the reference implementation of a Fountain parser in Objective-C.
More information at fountain.io.
