Introducing highlights in First Draft Pro
Happy new feature day story nerds! 🎉
Over the last few weeks we’ve released a few improvements to the app, and one major new feature: text highlighting. This week’s newsletter covers our latest release (version 1.0.69), and an upcoming writer’s meet-up in Amsterdam.
Highlights in First Draft Pro
This feature was requested by one of our book coach partners, who uses FDP’s collaborative toolset with their authors to nurture their stories as they come to life. That means they give a LOT of feedback, and sometimes comments alone aren’t enough.
They wanted to be able to use colour-coded highlights to convey information about certain sections of text. Challenge accepted.
We needed to make sure highlights would be beautiful and functional (in line with our design values). That meant we needed to make a few changes to the app to make sure that highlights would look great in both light and dark mode.
Read the help article to learn how to add, remove and change the colour of highlights.
Other improvements (v 1.0.69)
Fixed Toolbar Flicker — We fixed a bug that made the tool bar flicker when highlighting text. This now works really smoothly.
Fixed Chapter Menu Visibility — We changed the colour of the menu icon (three dots) on chapters so that you can more clearly see how to delete or add new chapters.
Magic Em Dashes & Arrows — We added shortcuts so that a double hyphen (- -) will turn into an em dash (—); and a hyphen and greater than symbol (->) will turn into an arrow (→) when writing anywhere (including the outline). See all special punctuation shortcuts (there are 20!).
Writing Meet-up in Amsterdam
On the 10th of December, we’ll be hosting a writing event with LDW Amsterdam, focused on community, cosy vibes, and a series of writing sprints.
LWD Amsterdam is a chapter of the international “Ladies, Wine, and Design” organisation. They rebranded to LWD to be more inclusive and expansive (which we love). Their mission is to foster more diversity in the creative industry, and they run many workshops, talks, and creative meet-ups for Amsterdam-based creatives.
If you’re based in or visiting Amsterdam, sign-up for the event here (the registration fee is to cover the choc-chip cookie bill 🍪)
Feedback and feature requests
If you have feedback or feature requests for First Draft Pro, you can add them (and upvote others) on our brand new feedback forum. The new highlights feature was requested by a user, so we take this feedback super seriously!