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Join the alpha

Cold Open is a new screenwriting app, and we’d like your help to make it good. The alpha has every feature in, and it’s careful with your work. What it needs now is people using it, and telling us how it went.

Anyone can join. You don’t need to be a screenwriter, have a GitHub account, or sign up for anything.

How to take part

  1. Download the latest alpha and install it. It takes a few minutes.
  2. Follow one track of the tester guide:
    • For anyone: about 20 minutes. Write a short scene, crash it on purpose, track a friend’s changes, export a PDF.
    • For screenwriters: longer. Bring in a draft of your own, revise it, compare drafts, read the reports.
  3. Tell us how it went (below). What feedback helps says what makes a report easy to act on.

You can stop at any point. Half a track, with a note about where you got stuck, helps as much as a whole one.

Tell us

Use whichever suits you:

  • Share feedback… in Cold Open’s palette, About or start screen (from 0.1.0-alpha.3): type what you think, and tick Include my usage summary if you’d like us to see which features you use (what it holds).
  • Report a problem… in Cold Open’s palette (Ctrl+K, or Cmd+K on a Mac), or in About Cold Open. It opens a ready-filled page with Cold Open’s version and your system, and nothing from your script.
  • GitHub issues for a bug, a file that won’t open, or an idea.
  • GitHub Discussions to say how testing went, ask a question, or talk ideas through.
  • The feedback form, if you don’t have a GitHub account. Your answers come to us privately.

Issues and discussions are public. Please don’t attach or paste a script you don’t own, even a draft you were sent: write a short scene of your own that shows the problem instead.

Especially wanted

  • Mac and Linux testers. We test on Windows every day. Choose Measure performance in the palette (it takes about two minutes), then send us the two small files it writes to your Downloads folder. They hold your computer’s model names and the timings, and nothing personal.
  • Screenwriters with .fdx files from productions. Does a script come back the way it went, and does the page count match what you expect?
  • People who’ve never written a script. Does the element flow make sense without the guide?

What happens to your feedback

We read all of it. Bugs become issues that are fixed in the next alpha, and the changelog says what changed. New alphas are announced in Discussions. To hear about them, watch the repository on GitHub (Watch ▸ Custom ▸ Releases), or check back here.

Thank you.