First Draft’s First Update

(1.18.16 First Draft was the “rough draft” of Rough Draft’s name • update)

We’re happy to announce the first revision or v1.1 of First Draft! Many small design & stability improvements have been made thanks to your tweets, emails, and feedback.

Since it’s November and NaNoWriMo is under way lets start with a timely update if you’re racing towards 50,000 words or a daily 1,670!

Set word count goals & get congratulation notifications

If you’re happy to see this thank Anna for keeping the pressure on us to add the word count notification!

Set your goal for a draft in the settings, and just start writing.

Don’t get distracted checking your current count, and asking, “Are we there yet?” you’ll get a congratulatory notification when you reach your goal.

No more [option + delete] crash

Thanks Chris and Norman for your help and patience as we fixed it. This along with some other [option] / [alt] key shortcuts have been fixed.

No more cutting crashes

Thanks to Charles Magnuson for pointing out a crash that happened when using [command + x], and the many other fixes that you’ve suggested.

Thanks to Charles now cutting not only works, it works like this:

Hiding the prompts + more

Thanks to Luke Chrisinger’s comment on Product Hunt there’s now a switch to hide the r/WritingPrompts button when opening a new draft.

Also thanks to Luke’s feedback the onboarding is now skippable too. If you miss it or want to come back to it later, it can be seen anytime from the Help menu.

We’re working on more text-size and font options too! There’s some tricky points with them that will make them take a little longer…

Easier to understand strikethroughs

Thanks to Andrew McLaughlin for his thoughts on this on Product Hunt!

Now it’s easy to see exactly what you will strikethrough next, and where you’ll pick up typing once you start back up.

After we pushed out this update we realized that some writers may want to turn off the strikethrough preview… What do you think?

Tweet us, reply to this, or highlight and comment anywhere to let us know what you’d like to see in version 1.2!

What’s next?

We’re excited to be getting out the beta of First Draft for iOS very soon! Along with that, we’re working on some small ways to get your first draft out to friends and get the feedback that counts!

Tweet us if you want to give the beta a try on your iPad or 📱!

If you haven’t gotten the update yet, or haven’t gotten First Draft yet: