January 9, 2024: The Day I Got Sick of Final Draft's Sh*t

Why I left the "industry standard" screenwriting software and started building my own

I'm sure we all remember where we were that day. January 9, 2024, the day Final Draft surprise-dropped version 13, and among its marquee new features was emoji support. And they marketed the heck out of it. Emojis were everywhere in their advertising. It was Emoji-fever at the Final Draft offices.

For years I'd dealt with the bugs. The price hikes. The ever-increasing bloat features nobody asked for. But emojis? Emojis were the straw that broke this camel's back.

At first I was just upset on principle. Emojis? Who wants emojis in a screenplay? The Emoji Movie, the only possible use case I could imagine for this feature, was already almost seven years old at this point. So why? WHY?!

And then I found out the answer.

This was a change they had to make because their text engine, the core of the most expensive screenwriting software on the market, was woefully out of date. Versions 10 and older didn't even support Unicode, and the versions that followed were still playing catch-up. In the year of our Lord 2024, Final Draft was still dragging its text rendering into the modern era.

In case you don't know, Unicode is the universal standard that lets computers display every character from every language, plus symbols and (wait for it)… EMOJIS! It was published in 1991 and by the mid-2000s everything you used supported it: your operating system, your browser, your phone. Final Draft got there about 15 years after the rest of the world.

You see, they didn't want to give us emojis (which, to reiterate, we never wanted). They had to give us emojis, because modernizing their ancient text rendering meant emoji support came along for the ride.

And here they were, marketing it as some big gift to the screenwriting community. A gift which they would undoubtedly use to justify their next price increase.

So yeah, January 9, 2024, that is the day they lost me for good. And the day I started building something better.

Wriffen is a screenwriting app built by two brothers. A screenwriter who got tired of being handed 💩 and being told it was a 🎁, and his much smarter younger brother who does computer stuff. We promise we will never treat our users this way.