Untitled

Unleash your inner screenwriter

$9.99 From Levcoh, untitledapp.co Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 8.0 or later

Untitled is a notepad for people who think their calling is to pen a Hollywood blockbuster (or a desperately cool indie flick).

At its core, the app’s a basic text editor. You tap out your masterpiece, and a keyboard toolbar assists with adding Markdown for bold, italic, or underline styles; there’s also a full-screen mode, to help you focus on difficult scenes.

But Untitled is cleverer than the average text app, in that if you follow some basic rules, it’ll automatically format your screenplay when you tap the preview button. For example, type “Outside the office at night,” and that becomes “EXT. OFFICE – NIGHT.”

There are plenty of other niceties in this area. The app makes it extremely easy to quickly construct a title page. Character names and dialog are kept simple: type names and then what they say on the lines below. For a shot or transition, just add a period or greater-

than symbol at the line’s start. Embed notes in double square brackets for your eyes only.

It all feels rather smart, but we wish the app was smarter still. It’d be great if Untitled remembered and could auto-input character names after you’ve typed a few letters. Styling isn’t live, so you have to hop back and forth between the editor and preview. Export options are also a problem. You can choose TXT, PDF, or HTML, but if you’re after FDX to continue Citizen Kane 2: This

Time It’s Personal in Final Draft on your Mac, you’re out of luck.

As a simple, streamlined script editor for when you’re on the move, Untitled does the job – especially on iPhone, where it feels more at home than on iPad. Although we’d love to see the aforementioned “missing” features, we also hope that if they arrive in an update, it’s not at the expense of the app’s laudable elegance. Despite its shortcomings, Untitled’s simplicity and approachable nature are very much its unique selling points.

THE BOTTOM LINE. A good start, with room to grow – just like your screenwriting career.