The best apps are developed from some personal need. From the original Photoshop to Lumberjack System, to our latest – Reading is Fundamental – the apps are first developed for one user!
Over the last couple of years, my editing “experience” has mostly revolved around product explainer and educational videos, so when a friend asked me to edit some spec pieces for her actor’s reel, I jumped at the chance to cut some (short) drama.
My friend is a very talented writer and actor, and has strong opinions about her edits, and to save time finding the best takes, she provided me with a spreadsheet for the edit points, and a Word document with more detailed explanations about the edit, in case the timecode alone weren’t enough.
I very quickly rediscovered the frustration with constantly swapping back and forward between FCP, Numbers and Pages.
Unlike most people I am married to one of the most talented programmers in the pro video world, so I asked for a “simple reader” as a FCP Woirkflow Extension. Being our first Workflow Extension, it took a little more time to develop than would have been ideal, but we are now proud to release Reading is Fundamental! a versatile multi-document reader for FCP.
Reading is Fundamental! loads a wide variety of documents, as indicated in the default document that loads when it first opens. You can open multiple documents – of different types – and navigate between them, so I can have both my spreadsheet and Word doc open at the same time, and switch between them in amount.
If you do need to open the document to copy from it, then there’s a “load in original app” button to facilitate it. (RIF! doesn’t currently support select and copy and it’s non-trivial to implement, but we continue to look for ways to achieve copy.)
Reading is Fundamental! is $4.99 in the Mac App Store.