Rough Draft App Reviews

Rough Draft is unique in both design and function, but unfortunately still suffers from some problems which are holding it back. Before going into all that, I’m not sure if this was a bug isolated to my computer or not, but despite being purchased throught the app store my copy of Rough Draft completely failed to update. Couldn’t even force an update through the app itself, had to uninstall and then reinstall. I have never had this problem with any other app and never with any previous updates. Anyway, here are my personal issues with Rough Draft: - Whatever type of coding/engine is being used here either needs to be seriously overhauled, or just scrapped completely. I know that’s NOT what a developer wants to hear, but the app remains a janky mess, albeit much faster than when it was first released. It feels like a Windows app hastily ported over to Mac; that bad. I know this is the typical “entitled mac user” talk, but the fact is that the experience is distracting and that is the last thing you want for a focused writing app. - The overall design and fuction of the app is unique and interesting, but some things about it just baffle me. Right off the bat, my complaint with v 1.6 was that I couldn’t drag drafts to the trash—the only way to dispose of them. This has been fixed, but let me be clear: making this the only way to delete drafts is simply counterintuitive. Im not able to select a draft outside of a right click (which only presents you with the option to export), making it impossible to press the ‘delete’ key on my keyboad, the simplest solution, or even just cycle through with the arrow keys. WHY? If you want a fancy trashcan inside the app, fine, but do make it the only option for users and force them to manually drag the files over. It is a waste of precious creative time. Another thing that irks me is that there is no indication that you have just clicked on a draft… they can in fact be highlighted (as I mentioned before), but when you click it’s just your cursor and the fade-in animation. It’s strange, and to top it all off there have been many times where I accidentally clicked once on a draft and had to close it. If we were able to contextually highlight each item in the menu, enabling a double click, this would not be an issue. That aside, the icons at the bottom of the editor look nice but short of looking for a user guide there is no popover text that inidicates what each button does or is. The export button at the top right is sloppily integrated, you can click on the button several (several) pixels to the left or right of it, continuously switching from cursor to hand. The in-app settings menu is. terrible. Please, redesign it. The gear icon doesn’t mesh well with the app’s overall theme at all, the menu still opens to lag, and a font size slider… really? One last gripe, the little side notes are hard to do away with, you have to click off far to the left to make the thing go away. I don’t usually nitpick like this, I swear, but there are so many little irritating choices and oversights being made here for no good reason. - What happened to the nifty export screen? I don’t think I imagined it, in the previous version when I pressed the ‘export’ button I was able to view a formatted view of my draft. It used to let me switch between “write/export.” That was a pretty useful feature that got cut there. Whether or not there are plans to reimplement it, for now this is major letdown. Reminds me of iA Writer’s flip-flopping feature additions/subtractions back when they weren’t listening to their customers. Don’t be that developer. There is so much to appreciate here, but also so much not to. I would reccommend that people buy this app purely based on its potential alone, but it has its fair share of frustrating problems. I will say that the icon looks fantastic, a huge improvement over the previous one. Really want this app to succeed. Please, take some of this review/advice into consideration.

Are you serious about all of the updates? There is seriously one every other day! I’m beginning to think I might be wasting my time.

This is a very cool idea, and I would love for it to work — but as you can see from the constant stream of updates, the quality control for this thing is pretty chaotic. Right off the bat, it becomes so laggy as to be totally unusable on my 27” retina iMac. I mean, so slow that words take 5-10 seconds to appear on screen. In regular window mode it seems OK-ish? I made a comment in my previous review (see below) about how weird the format of the rough draft export was to bring into a Markdown app for safe keeping — and they immediately (in one of the near-daily updates to this app) changed it to .rtf, which makes it a lot harder to do what I was doing. Classy! I’ll be moving on, thanks guys. ------------------------------------------- Lastly, the format for an export of a rough draft file is some insane mess of custom tags instead of, say, standard Markdown. If you take the time to do a bit of find/replace, you can change the weirdo tags it uses to mark deleted text, and replace with “||” so you can paste the whole thing into Ulysses or some other Markdown-aware editor and have a permanant copy of your rough draft with all the deletions marked. That’s what I was thinking of doing (have no other use for this thing), but this app is too unstable to use for more than 5 minutes.

The whole “deleting” words using strike through is so confusing. And having to pay over 20$ is sort of ridiculous! I mean I guess I could just not ever export things, but still. Might try continuing using if I can figure out how to use this strike through.

I love this app and would have continued using it for my writing. But $15, though? EDIT: by the way, writing is free, but $15 to export to a “beyond first draft" app

I’ll be succinct. In an App Store full of similar writing apps that promise a distraction free enviromnent and tout some impressive, but also at times unnecessary, features for $50 a pop, this app strikes a chord. It allows you to basically sail through a draft of anything you’re doing (I’m sure screenwriters will appreciate some more feature rich formatting tools, but for basic idea generation, blogs, etc, it’s lovely and simplistic) without worrying about destroying the productivity of “editing as you go.” it’s worth it’s asking price for export. Totally. I’ll be a user for a long time, I’m sure. And the “free to jump in and try” is just great. Wish more apps pulled that rabbit out of their hats.

I love the concept of this app. Many people certainly can benefit from the non-stop nature of the edting it provides. Some things are frustrating though. For example, you can undo a delete (command-delete), but not fully remove a strikethrough. I understand that might go against the concept of the app, but sometimes the strikethrough as calculated by the app doesnt represent the edit you made. It woudl be nice to be able to permanently remove a strikethrough (a contextual menu for doing so would be great). You can command-delete to undo a strikethrough, but you cant select text at all to do that, because that might allow you to copy text, which it doesnt let you do until you upgrade to the full version which allows exporting. This is annoying, since sometimes you want to copy and paste within a document when writing. $15 for the ability to copy and paste within a text document seems a bit steep. Seems it would be better to allow you to copy text that includes the strikethroughs, and Export would allow you to export without the strikethroughs. Not allowing copy and paste makes it really difficult to use the app to evaluate it, so its hard to get to a point where I would spring for the Export upgrade.

I was very excited to get find app. I’d been looking for something that wasn’t crazy pricy yet simple and straight forward. I’m in the middle of writting a show. or WAS in the middle. Today I sat down in front of this app very excited and motivated to start really writing this show but now I am at “starting over”. I had a good 12-13 pages written but when I went to save it, I got the message that I could NOT SAVE, copy and past or EXPORT without purchasing the in app upgrade. I was actually fine with that. I knew it when I got it. So, I went to the export button which prompts you to purchase. When I did IT CRASHED. BOOM. GONE! EVERYTHING… GONE. Praying that is kept my work in App, I tried to reopen… CRASH, CRASH CRASH… over and over… just trying to reopen CRASH. I even went as far as to uninstall and reinstall through app store… praying. NOPE CRASH CRASH CRASH! So it’s all really gone and this F’ing app took it with it! DONT DO IT if you don’t wanna cry when you lose it all.

There are several apps offering small, incremental improvements to the writing process. This one cleverly enforces Hemingway’s advice to “write drunk, edit sober”. The minimalist, distraction-free interface fades behind the words, as it should. I also love the Reddit /r/WritingPrompts integration for those moments when writer’s block strikes furiously. Speaking of Hemingway, this app would instantly get my $15 if it included the same word and sentence analysis tools as the Hemingway App. Pretty please? :)

This application is not Word. It is not a typewriter. It is not pen-to-paper. It is not an average everyday writing tool. It is ‘just Write’ (and yes, pun intended). I am a writer who has used quite a few writing applications. I have Word, I have a pen and gave up my type writer circa 1985. So, when I found First Draft, I was enlightened. The developers have taken the simplicity of writing and made it what writing a ‘first draft’ is all about — simple. I tell people in my life, if you want to write — just write. First Draft enables a person to write without thinking about form or mechanics. The mere tapping of keystrokes onto the app’s simple interface encourages ideas. A writer who is truly creative does not need fancy tools. The writer simply needs to write. Thank you First Draft developers — I have finally come back around to writing.

This text editor has some nice features but there are other writing tools that help you focus on getting things down on “paper” at a much better price. This is a one trick product and it is not worth the in app purchase just to export the text.

The new icon really bothers me. I liked the old circle icon much better. The old app icon felt much more professional, while the new icon feels childish. Other than that the app is still great with no major issues to speak of.

Developers all look like twenty-something guys. I’m a sixty-something woman who writes a lot. Great concept. Microscopic font that doesn’t respond to “Command/+”. And your little website contact button didn’t work. Interesting idea but until the app is accessible for all Mac users, it’s worthless. Unless you guys don’t care about older Mac users...

it just crashs down right

I write essays, blog posts, and other lengthy documents in Chinese, but Rough Draft does not even let me write in Chinese; rather, it cancels my characters and takes the pinyin (Latin alphabet romanization) and treats it like English, which doesn’t work at all. It believe it would be pretty simple to enable other languages like Chinese in the app, but I am not an app developer and am unsure of the intricacies of it all.

This app is great for a college student wanting to write an essay! It is very flowing and useful!!! HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

After paying $15 for the export feature, this app won’t give me what I paid for.

Cost a little more, but you know this up front… and is a professional level application for not much more...

I personally don’t need to write in any other language than English. I was able to change the font, including size, in the settings. I haven’t encountered any crashes, nor perceived any lack of responsiveness or delay in the interface, and my Mac is by no-means powerful. I was well-aware that the “free” version of this app was meant to serve as a trial, rather than deception, and I prefer that over buying an app outright, only to discover that it doesn’t work as I anticipated. However, I feel it’s expensive given the current features. This app is a typical no-frills, plain-text, writing app. The only value-proposition is that it forces you to focus on what you say rather than how you say it. While it does that job well, but I do feel as though $15 is expensive for a writing app that’s designed to support, rather than replace, other less-expensive alternatives. Additionally, when writing with the window maximized, the last line is difficult to read due to a gradient opacity overlay. It continues that way until you reach the next line and the app scrolls back up. It would be nice to have an option to keep the last line in the middle of the page so you do not have to look at the bottom of your monitor the whole time youre writing. Exporting directly to blogs and Devonthink/Evernote (similar to what Byword does) would be a nice feature to help justify the price.

I ilke your app. Nice, simple. But It is not working on Korea. Please have a chance.