Not knowing fountain or wanting to spend a couple of hours creating a cheat sheet or learning it, I gave up and tried this. I have Final Draft on my iPad which is fantastic, but the price for the Mac version is a bit steep, so I tried xScreenplay. Right way it was pretty simple, and even though I couldn’t select the postition as I can in Final Draft, the pop up tells you where you are and the hints are pretty good. If you know how a screen play should be formatted, it helps since you don’t select “Scene” to start writing a scene. If you know what a “slugline” is and no, it isn’t the blog from House of Cards, there are shortcuts in the edit menu for the 5 most used formatting items which was very helpful after I found them. If they where on screen with icons, it would be a bit faster.Finally the pop up for character names does help speed up the writing and the ability to start a line with a . to create a new slug line does speed it up.If you have never even seen proper Hollywood standard formatting, get a guide so this makes sense. I am sure there is an easy wiki somewhere on line, and then xScreenwriter is a good deal for less than $10!

The software is quick to learn and there have been no bugs with the software. I wish I could add notes/comments on the margins and include reference images; this would make the software exceptional and easily deserving of 5 stars.

It’s a great program for writing the dialogue for scenes, but there are features that don’t work like the scene list- scene numbering - color versions - I cannot figure out how to get those features to work after I paid for the program. Just make it work and it would be great.

I just need a simple screenplay writer for my students, and I have been trying to use this one. At first glance, it seems great. Simple and easy to use, but after spending more time trying to get it to work, it’s just stuck on the transition mode. I’ll keep trying, but I’m already looking for something else. It’s not letting me select the different formats easily, and it keeps going back to one that I didn’t even select. I guess you get what you pay for.