I've received a lot of email since my post about Oliver Taylor's screenwriting bundle for TextMate yesterday, and almost all of it was about Celtx, an open-source, multi-platform screenwriting package. First, let me say that I was not aware of this package before yesterday, which is somewhat surprising since I've made an effort in the past to find alternatives to Final Draft and because I am the kind of person who is usually aware of such things. Nevertheless, it was news to me, so thanks to everyone who sent in info.
I downloaded the Celtx package and installed it, and my first thought was that it was too complicated. If you look at the feature tour, you'll see what I mean almost right away. Celtx has a sort of project management-esque layer to it, and I was immediately interested and frustrated by it. While I like the idea of keeping all of your related materials, planning and media together with your script as you develop it, I don't know that Celtx's way of achieving this is very well done. I may differ from other people in this regard, but I have a habit of planning too much and not writing enough. The fact that I had to create a project before I could start writing a script meant I had to think more about the project on a whole and, at the beginning of a script, that's a bad thing for me. Sometimes I just want to get right in there and start writing. Now, if you're the kind of person who plans the hell out of your projects before you start to write (e.g. you're the exact opposite of me (Shawn)), this might be really good news for you. Obviously, the TextMate solution has similar potential, since you can just create a project (a folder) and keep of your data together (which is what I do). The difference is that with TextMate (or even Final Draft), you don't have to start a project.
Furthermore, Celtx crams a lot of stuff into a single app. For instance, there is a calendar, prop list, tagging, notes, media browser, and more. That's a lot of stuff. Most of it is related to production far more than screenwriting, so I might suggest Celtx in that regard (in fact, unless I come across any real problems in the near future as I play around with it, consider this a recommendation) but, the unfortunate part is, I found the screenwriting aspect of the app to be quite weak and filled with the same kinds of bugs that Final Draft had. Start typing a simple script and you're immediately faced with lots of textual problems and tabbing nightmares. At one point, with a simple accidental press of tab, I ended up getting stuck in some sort of nightmare where my dialogue turned into action and my characters into sluglines, and I couldn't manage to repair the situation without deleting some text and selecting the rest and changing its type using the types select menu. That's a pain.
One cool feature Celtx has is its internet integration—you can backup and share your projects using their web services, although I haven't tested this so I can't vouch for it. It's also worth mentioning that while the Celtx app is free, they do plan to charge for the web services they provide (see "If you're giving Celtx away for free, how do you make money?" on the FAQ page at the Celtx website). How much and when they'll start, I don't know. It would be nice to have a simple way to share projects like this, as Shawn and I constantly do, but I don't know if this system is the best for it anyway. The truth is, I don't know if there's a really solid way to collaborate on a script at the same time anyway, so all of this might be moot. But again, for producers, sharing a single project that contains all of your production details like this would be nice, although I don't see any reason you couldn't just share your Celtx project files using your .Mac account or even just FTP or email.
Obviously, this all boils down to personal use and for me, it's critically important that I have a simple way to write in screenplay format. Nothing else really matters to me, because the rest comes easy. Planning shooting and managing media—there are already good systems in place for those things (say, for instance, iCal, my mobile phone, Finder and hard drives), and I don't think a screenwriting app should have these features. Or at least, if they do, the screenwriting parts of the application should be rock solid, which, in the case of FD and Celtx, they're not. Oliver Taylor's TextMate bundle is extremely simple, but that's exactly what I need for writing. Last night I created a new user on my PowerBook with the following features: Safari, iChat and TextMate. I turned everything else off. I opened TextMate and started writing. And you know what? I actually wrote.
