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All this rumor about illegal software sweeping reminds me of my long lost 'resolution' to convert to Linux. Why? Well, I had a P3 notebook at that time. 128 MB RAM, 12 GB harddisk. Installing Linux was perfectly logical. After all, there are several reasons why Linux is better My constraint back then was I can't find replacements for several softwares. The most important one was the proprietary Final Draft. It doesn't have a Linux version, and if it does, I didn't want to spend USD 300 on software either. (To make clear, yes, I did use pirated WinXP with pirated softwares including pirated Final Draft).

Now I'm using a more decent notebook with—thank's to Edo—legal WinXP. But I think I might switch to Linux someday on the condition that:

• My notebook is alive
• Everybody's using Mikocok have altered to Vista
• And whatever the h*ll Bill Gates do to improve it, my notebook still can't bear the requirements.

By then, I'd convert to Linux.

And I already found a perfect software to replace Final Draft. Well, almost perfect. I present you... Celtx.


Well, there was already a version of Celtx 1.5 year ago, but it was awful. The layout was confusing, the file was barely accessible and it couldn't be exported to PDF. It was impossible. The only way to make the file available to other to read was printing it. But I didn't have a printer. And I couldn't open the file except in my own laptop. Couldn't copy it to Word or Notepad either.

But now... after a year, they fix everything. I downloaded Cinergy and Celtx last January. Having bad experience with Celtx, I tried Cinergy first. It has similar interface with Final Draft, but lot less powerful. Plus advertising. Well, yeah, that's all you can expect from a freeware, right?

Wrong. I tried Celtx and I was amazed. I like the clean-tabbed look that they adopt from Mozilla. It's still not as powerful as Final Draft, but most of the time it's enough. I already got really used to Final Draft's shortcuts and one of the coolest thing about Final Draft is you can customize them. I don't have it in Celtx, but the standard shortcuts are already quite similar to Final Draft's and I'm happy with that. The file organization was much better (the previous one was nightmare, you get a folder and a suspicious look file in it). And I can easily convert the file to PDF (and the result looks better than Final Draft's PDF, haha).



So, for you who don't want to spend USD 229 for Final Draft (is the price reducing? I thought it was 300 something), I really really recommend Celtx.