Sabo Typist 0.5: projects, the formats, and a faster first minute

Version 0.5 is out. It is the version where the editor learned what a project is, and the one where it stopped keeping you waiting.

Projects

A project is a folder in Documents › sabo typist, and inside it the documents, and beside them the project's own notes, sources, drafts and Trash. The app opens on the project you had open. File › Projects… lists them, to switch, rename or delete; the line at the top of the documents pane switches too.

A new project asks what it is for — a blog post, a short story, a novel, a film script, a television script, a radio play, a stage play, a musical, a podcast, an academic paper, a document, or anything at all — and shows the page each one starts on, every item of it there to change before the project is made. Tick the starter and the first document comes typed: your name and address at the top left of a story, a book's title page, a script's title page with who to call at the foot, the paper's heading. The details come from Settings › Personal, which is new, and where there is nothing there yet the lines say what goes on them.

Nothing in the file marks any of it. The title matter is ordinary lines, read by where they stand, the way the formats themselves are written, and it lands on the screen where it lands on paper. The count is drawn, not typed, and stays current. ⌘Return ends a page.

The formats

Beside the screenplay there are now twelve script formats, measured off the templates the BBC and the Dramatists Guild publish: BBC film and television, the taped drama and the taped sitcom, the American three-camera and tape-live sitcoms, radio in the BBC's cue style and scene style and the American one, the stage play as America and as Britain set it, the Broadway musical and the Guild's modern musical. Each element sits at its own column in its own face, in capitals or underlined where the format says so, and the paper and the screen count the same pages.

A document — a letter, a cover letter, a résumé, minutes, an agenda, an agreement, a report, school work, the outlines writers plan with — keeps its markdown in the file, and the page hides the marks: a heading in its size with the hashes gone, a bullet for a list's dash, a rule across the page for three dashes. On the line the caret is on, the marks come back.

The rest

Export offers rich text (.rtf) and plain text beside Markdown, PDF, Word and Final Draft. A rich text file, or TextEdit's kind with pictures in it, comes in as markdown. The drafts are a section at the foot of the documents pane now, not a window: open it, choose a draft, and it is over the page with what changed marked, and Bring This Draft Back does what it says.

The first minute

The first launch of 0.4 on a Mac whose Documents folder is kept in iCloud Drive could sit for half a minute under the beachball. The app read every file in the library at once, and iCloud fetched each one while everything waited. That is gone. Pictures are read in the background. A draft is judged by what changed since the last one, so leaving a document no longer reads the whole library. A document iCloud still holds is asked for and shown when it comes, and the page waits for it instead of the whole app. The library's index is written only when something in it changed.

The page is faster too. A long document — a novel, on sheets — used to take seconds to lay out, and again whenever its page count moved under the typing. The pages are now cut by arithmetic rather than by a path per page, and a hundred thousand words come up in well under a second, with every page break exactly where it was.

Under the hood the parts of the editor that have nothing to do with the Mac are being separated from the parts that do, so that one day the same core can be built somewhere else. There is nothing to see of that yet, and there should not be.