Rough Draft App Reviews

I started using this back in November when I think it first released? SInce then things have come a long way! The app is much more stable than it was and there are a lot of new subtle features that keep me focused on just writing. I write this (rough!) review from Rough Draft as I prepare to hit the “buy” button. I had used it primarily to allow myself to more freely explore the myriad thoughts that come to mind during the course of a normal day, and also to tee up the more “heavy” writing I do. But now after looking back at a few months of the free writing I’d done, I’ve noticed just how playful the thoughts that come out of writing in this little app are. i haven’t been able to write like this… ever? I even started to list some drafts on the OnlyRoughDrafts.com site as well recently, and got some good feedback too. I think I’ll give this a shot for 2016 and see where it takes my writing. OK 96 Problems (but an app ain’t one!), you’ve earned my money!

Been using this for a bit, and happy to see another consistently quick update that seems to be making things smoother and more stable. It may not be perfect yet, it does what it says helping break my deleting habit and helping me write.

Every once in a while you come across an app that hits every note a proper app should—great concept, UI, UX, etc—but which has one or two serious flaws that manage to muck everything up. Rough Draft, disappointingly, is one of those apps… at least for me. The good: - The concept is solid. A drafting application which encourages writers to strike out rather than delete their mistakes? Brilliant. It serves a purpose. - It has a personality all its own, not just another genetic OS X “transparent sidebars here, square buttons there” deal. It stands out. - Informative beginners tutorial which teaches users how everything works. I wish more apps did this, honestly. - Isn’t just another “distraction-free + markdown” writing app. It has functionality that’s useful for writers and manages not to be overly pretentious about its purpose. The bad: - Expensive (yes, expensive) in-app purchase for export. Such an integral feature is not worth $14.99, and frankly neither is this app; Rough Draft is worth a fair $9.99 in its entirety, including the ability to export. I’d gladly pay a little extra for EXTRA features, but that isn’t what this is. This is a backhanded scheme to make it seem like you are getting a free app when in actuality, for that price, you are not. It’s a bit scummy. - Animation lag is an issue. The in-app settings take a good 2 seconds to show up after clicking the icon, and even when they do eventually show it’s really, really rough. Other animations like entering/leaving the folder view are smooth, but still see a slight delay. Entering fullscreen mode is an exercise in frustration. I’m not a developer so I can’t say what’s causing these things to happen (pretty sure it’s not my $1,700 computer), but they need to be addressed as soon as possible. Though the good points technically outnumber the bad, the few it has are hard to ignore. Rough Draft is yet another potentially great app mired by poor business decisions and I won’t be keeping it installed for very long. Export is a must-have feature for any serious writing program, and while it is possible to copy/paste your words out of it (albeit with all the strikethroughs and grey coloring intact), it just isn’t an equivalent. The developer obviously only made this app free just to get more people to download it (not inherently bad…), with the hopes that they would actually be desperate enough to pay for exporting capability at a premium price (definitely bad). That’s a cheat if I’ve ever seen one. Download it if you don’t care about export or not owning the app entirely, otherwise look elsewhere until the developer comes to their senses. Might happen, might not.

This is a cool concept for a “prototyping” kind of writing app - getting ideas down on paper, along with the context of stuff you’ve scratched out. It looks nice and the concept is well carried out. But … The feature set mentions syncing and there is no syncing. I have multiple Macs and not being able to have my work synced is kind of a deal-killer. Maybe that feature comes with the paid version,. but the web site says it’s included with the free one. The typography looks nice but there’s no way to control line and para spacing. You have to hit two returns to add a space between paras. Maybe that was intentional, but if you’re used to something else (i.e. more para spacing), it means you’re constantly having to stop yourself to add the extra line-break. The wireframe items can’t be moved. Sometimes the formatting goes haywire - everything shifted to the left - with no way to fix it other than delete everything. The price point is also kind of high - even at half off - for what it delivers.

It only works with English or Western languages, not with Asian languages.

Full screen modes light/dark, punishment for deleting by adding strikethroughs, word counts. $7.00 for clean export with strikethroughs replaced. Pretty fun app for plowing through NanoWriMo, blogs, and other writing chores. Pretty satisified!

Love the concept. Hope they can work out the bugs.

I like the idea of typing in some state of flow - but for that to work best, I want to completely AVOID hitting the backspace key... I dont see a huge difference in hitting the backspace key as a backspace, vs a strikethrough. Thats just a gimick. What you need is some kind of vim functionality where you can type in some key combination like "xo4" to block out the last for words or letters... That would be cool.

I think I could like using this, but like too many other writing apps, this one forces you to write at the bottom edge of the screen in fullscreen. These developers do a better job, by jumping back up to near the middle when you go off the screen, but then you work your way down to the bottom again. I hate writing in the shadows of the edge of the screen. Why not keep the bottom edge an inch or couple of cm off the bottom? Or maintain it near the middle. I want to focus on the line I’m working on, which I don’t want at the bottom. Make it a setting for people who can’t live with the idea of having all that blank space. Okay, I finally saw that you can test export with all your errors intact. THAT wasn’t obvious. I don’t know if I didn’t notice the button, or it wasn’t there until all my text got shifted left (as noted below). And their support page says to contact them by using the particular button, which I couldn’t find until I realized the popping heads were covering it. I don’t want to start a conversation, I just want to send a comment. Stop popping at me! And now I just opened it again to look at my work and the text I’ve written is half off the left side of the window and I cannot move it back, so that just went to waste. Have to drop another star for that. Sorry.

I live in Republic of Korea. Korean Hangul would like to know When will be supported . This is not to write Hangul consonant and vowel combinations .

I’ve been looking for a good, distraction-free writing app for awhile, and after reading reviews for several, I decided on Rough Draft. It’s everything I need and works perfectly, allowing me to get my ideas down and worry about editing and cleaning up later. I especially like the strikethrough feature, which makes it easier to focus on the work rather than going back and cleaning up.

The idea is cool, and writing with this app is enjoyable. However, as a Chinese, I am surprised that it does not support Chinese writing. I cannot understand why the language is so limited, as other wirting apps can support all of the languages we can use in the laptop. I hope you can fix this problem as soon as possible.

Cool App! I’m frequently writing and revising and this App really helps make things easier. You can see your changes and revisions and it exports a nice clean copy. Would be cool if you could send to email or other programs (like iOS widgets) - maybe next version?

So I met Dave on Anchor and he told me about Rough Draft. When I first started writing again I found myself editing my pieces into an early grave. Rough draft prevents me from doing so, and that is awesome. Because when it comes to rough drafts the goal isn’t to write a perfect piece from the get go (if only we lived in a world where that was possible) the idea is to just barf out everything then and there and to not self censor. Rough draft keeps you from doing that! I haven’t used the onlin features yet but if past performance is an indicator of future performance it has to be awesome

Fix: the fact that the text keeps trailing all the way to the bottom of your screen before scrolling up. It can be done manually with a mouse scroll, but the whole point of this software is to eliminate distractions from writing, so please just fix this altogether. Add: feature where you can use the Revise function to quickly one-click update/revise your Rough Draft (IN Rough Draft) thus far, and return to the writer. For right now, 3 stars, do those two things, and it’ll be 5. Thank you.

Its normal thing, Find and Replace, but here, you can lose it all. He “delete” all text to the first reference of the searched and replaced word.

I like the concept of focusing on progress rather than revision because it helps prevent the constant edits of inevitable imperfections from slowing down the process to a standstill. I think, however, that it would be even better if they offered the capability to completely turn off the functionality of delete key all together, being that this is after all the idea. Also it would be nice if the line of text that you were working on would always remain in the same place preferably about the middle or just below that because this would help increase one’s ability to focus on that specific thought.

I like the concept behind this app. It does need a little polish, though. I also ran into the crashing tutorial problem. After reinstalling, the tutorial worked fine and I made it through to the actual program without issues and the app performs as advertised. The other issue I had was with purchasing clean exports, the $6.99 in-app purchase. The purchase worked fine on my Macbook Pro, but when I installed the app on my desktop and tried to restore the in-app purchase, it kept telling me I hadn’t purchased it. Tech support has acknowledged this and is presumably working on a fix, but for now I can only use the full featured version on my laptop. Once these annoying issues are fixed, and I assume they will be, this will be a four- or five-star review for me.

This app is a great way to overcome the difficulty of over-editing, and it’s way easier on the eyes than microsoft word. I definitely expect the developers will keep rolling out fixes and features. I encountered a bug with the text being cut off on the left side of the screen, so I used their ‘contact us’ chat on their website and Dave (co-developer) immediately gave me some extensive help that fixed the issue. 5 stars because the app is already great and I trust the developers to keep making it better.

This app has precisely the right mix of features and simplicity to encourage writing at the pace of your original ideas, rather than getting bogged down in the particulars of language. Unfortunately, error testing was clearly not the first priority, and I resent paying for such a relatively simple application with issues that make it inoperable, and even possible to lose work. I agree with previous reviewers: a center-scrolling feature would be nice, but far more important is the bug that shifts text to the left, causing it to be clipped by the window. I was unable to remedy the problem even after deleting and reinstalling the app, and the website is so poorly designed/coded that I too found it impossible to chat with tech support.