Love the Idea, but The App Itself is a Bit of a Mess (A Review for the Developer)

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.

Jon David Tucker about Rough Draft, v1.7.2