First Draft 1.3.1
New Year Tidying or “Osoji”
(1.18.16 First Draft was the “rough draft” of Rough Draft’s name • update)
In Japan–where we’re based–at the end of the year you do a big Spring cleaning or “Osoji/大掃除”, so you’re ready to spring😉 into the new year!
We mention this, because although we hinted at some big changes to come in the last update, we thought it better to clean up things in First Draft… first. After all, the features to support “flow state” and your just writing don’t matter if crashes keep you from getting into flow, or you stumble upon a big bug… 🐞😱
This isn’t going to be the funnest post to write, since it’s highlighting our mistakes and shortcomings… So lets get through this and get ready for a fresh start to next year!
We’ve sped things up!
When you really got into a flow and were hitting two or three thousand words First Draft would start slowing down… before! Thanks to @Adrianrconant and Valancy for tipping us off to this.
Most of our chapters had been shorter than theirs, so we hadn’t found it. Luckily there’s lots of talented writers 📝’ing many more words than our team in First Draft!
Crashes when deleting…
Luckily, Daniel gave us some tough love through the Intercom plugin on our website, letting us know that:
…version 1.3 (14) has a fatal bug in it, where if you are pressing backspace multiple times, app crashes.
We’ve got this issue fixed in this latest update. We’re very sorry this slipped through the cracks… Critical bugs like this should not be able to happen. We’re working to be better about catching these issues before they go out.
Please keep letting us know on Twitter or through our website if you find something. We really appreciate Daniel and writers like him.
Crashes on open…
A small portion of users have been unable to open First Draft, or had it continually crash on open. We’d been unable to replicate this on our end, but luckily Snippets came by our office and walked us through it. We think we’ve got it fixed now!
In case you’re interested in reading something Snippets started in First Draft (before it started acting up 😨) here is his latest Medium post (which hit the top 5! Congrats Hengtee!)
We’re very thankful for the handful of writers that kept in touch for months — some without ever being able to successfully open First Draft — and let us know about this issue. We’re so happy that the vision of First Draft resonated with them and we’re doing our best to make sure everything works smoothly from here on out.
Outside of the update
We’re happy to say that things are picking up with a great feature in TechCrunch by John Biggs, who put up with our bugs and saw the bigger potential of First Draft. We were really excited to see his feature and not share a drink to celebrate it! 😉
Onto the New Year!
With that we’re moving on to the new year and new big things! We hope you’ll look forward to what is coming next (releasing right at the start of 2016). We wish you a great countdown and celebrating everything or anything! 🎅🕌🕍⛩
Thanks for supporting the rough draft of First Draft in 2015! See you in ’16 with many more “s***ty” first drafts!
