Writing, leveled-up
We love building stuff that makes writers happy.
When we started building First Draft Pro, we had to make some decisions about what to spend our time on. We decided to put our resources into creating amazing outlining tools and notes, and we made the choice to use a third-party software to run the writing experience.
It was a good choice at the time. It helped us build the app faster! But, it had a lot of limitations, and it meant that there were some features that you guys were asking for, which we couldn't build.
It took us a three-month journey to get here, but we now have total control over the writing experience in the app, and the development of new features is now much easier. We couldn't have gotten here without you.
I want to thank everyone who has bought a paid subscription to the First Draft Pro writing app. Your support has made it possible.
The brand-new writing experience ✒️
The new text editor we've built is behind the scenes, so you might not even realise it's different.
With any new technology, there might be some sharp edges that we need to smooth out – so as you're using it over the next weeks and months, please let us know if anything feels slow or strange. Your feedback helps us get better faster, so we love hearing from you.
As part of this update, we also:
Updated our toolbar in the manuscript,
Updated the interactions for bringing the toolbar up – a long click or highlighting text will bring up the toolbar. You won't see the toolbar every time you click anymore (something you guys asked for a lot).
Added support for paragraph and heading styles in the manuscript.
Updated keyboard shortcuts for functions like: creating a chapter break (Alt+Enter); creating a scene break (Ctrl+Enter); adding a footnote (Ctrl+Alt+F); adding a link (Ctrl+K); adding a note (Ctrl+N); and adding a comment (Ctrl+M).
Auto-scroll on project and plot outlines 🛝
We also recently made auto-scrolling on the project and plot outline smoother, with added visual indicators to let you speed up the pace of the scroll.
And we fixed some weird scroll issues that some writers were experiencing when moving their cursor out of the browser window, so you should see a performance improvement there, too!
If you’re interested, here are the full release notes.
❤️ Want to see more features in First Draft Pro? If you love using First Draft Pro, you can support us by upgrading to the premium subscription — you'll be helping us build an amazing writing app! See pricing →