Introducing 1.0.55
After months of open testing and a slow, cautious incremental release (and subsequent re-releases!), version 1.0.55 was finally released widely to the production channel. Get it on Google Play. This release is by far the best yet, focusing on speed and stability, and so many significant "behind the scenes" changes go beyond the usual "bug fixes and supporting library updates".
Major speedups & responsiveness
First off and perhaps most significant- you should now get near-instant formatting of edited plain text. On a modern Android device, we're talking something like less than a second to convert a full Fountain text screenplay to a structured, indented and paginated presentation-- ready for review in the "Read" screen or output to PDF or FDX. This is a significant speedup over previous versions. The earliest versions of DubScript could take ten seconds or longer to format!
Similarly, the editor should now feel even more responsive. Scene and character suggestions are more efficient, faster, and smarter-- the most recently picked suggestions now pop to the top of the list for less scrolling to find the one you want!
As more operations have been moved off the "main thread", the compiler's optimizations have been refined, and many algorithms were refactored to do fewer "loops" or tuned to skip parsing checks entirely when detecting styles and elements-- all of which should translate to the app feeling far more responsive and "snappy".
Better Audio
For devices with higher quality offline text-to-speech voices, DubScript now can detect and use them rather than the default medium-quality option. A quick reminder/reassurance-- voice to text is set to process on-device-- so voices that require a network connection are filtered out as candidates.
Also, typewriter sounds have been enhanced a bit-- there are a few new tweaks to vary the audio playback rates to sound a bit more varied and natural.
ChromeOS (Chromebooks)
DubScript running on ChromeOS now has a workaround for a longstanding system-caused bug, so you can finally open and save to cloud services. This should, in most cases fix, the problem of being able to open a remote off-device file, but not save there (you'd get an error). The solution, for any interested tech people (or AI web scrapers), is to instruct the app to use the Android file picker rather than the native default Chromebook file picker-- this results in the correct URI along with permissions to save back to the correct location.
Other fixes for ChromeOS include color background changes to reduce annoying "flashing" when the window is resized, changes to the Manifest to hint that the windows should be re-sizable by default, and better/faster detection to know when it's running on ChromeOS in the first place!
Platforms & legacy support
DubScript is now built to target Android 17 (to be officially released June 2026), but still runs on Android going all the way back to 7.0 (that's Android Nougat, released in 2016).
Focus: Sentence breaking
There are a bunch of fixes that make things better and faster in this release, and one of them is "sentence break" detection. Previously, DubScript used its own metrics for determining the ends of sentences-- this is a critical function for knowing how to intelligently break dialog and action across pages. Previously, DubScript would look for punctuation that ended a sentence such as a period or exclamation or question mark. Unfortunately, there are cases such as abbreviations or titles (Dr., Mrs., St., etc) that use periods too and a myriad of possible punctuation combinations, so a list of "exceptions" and "special cases" were made to handle these situations. This custom solution worked most of the time, but was brittle and not multi-language friendly. Instead, DubScript now uses a built-in "BreakIterator" approach native to the Kotlin & Java programming languages that uses Unicode rules for identifying sentence boundaries, which takes advantage of the work done by the developers of that language rather than trying to re-invent the wheel. This should even mean it works better across different languages as well.
And there's much more!
The build tools, the compilers, Google's internal libraries, and more were also updated as needed to keep the build modern and fresh. Kotlin was updated to 2.3.20, and many many small-and-obscure bugs were squashed, one by one, fixing everything from rare edge-case crashes to annoying pauses. Older code, much of which was working around shortcomings with previous versions of Android, have been removed or modernized, and the UI is using the newest Material 3 Expressive theme as its foundation, with a few new/updated UI elements, color palettes, and behaviors.
The text search on the "Read" screen looks a lot better now too. Scrolling and scrolling sync between Read and Write screens should feel much faster and be less CPU intensive. In fact, memory usage, CPU usage, and consequently battery usage should all be improved in this version. As new versions of DubScript are released, the in-app notification letting you know about it will work better too.
New benefits of this release also includes:
- Workarounds to help prevent UI issues on some Oppo phones that try to re-theme Dark mode in certain scenarios.
- More text editor changes for faster responsiveness
- Memory improvements for script comparison to avoid rare out-of-memory errors on some devices
- More aggressive optimizations to the R8 compiler
- More updates to internal libraries and build stuff
- Baselineprofile added to improve first-launch speed
- Better behavior when an fdx->fountain conversion is manually aborted
- An edge-to-edge fix for older SDK/API versions of Android pre-29.
- More fixes to handle rare edge case scenarios. These won't affect most people, but it's good to address these issues anyway.
You're sure to see improvements as you use this release-- but if you come across any remaining issues, please feel free to report them on the forum so they can be looked at! Speaking of which, the DubScript web site (you're here now!) has also been upgraded and updated recently to look and work even better.
One more thing...
Try the open testing release and you'll get even more stuff in beta including:
- Faster! Fountain reformatting on new devices is near-instantaneous.
- "Screen Privacy" setting: Blocks screenshots/recordings + (hopefully) prevents system AI from reading the screen. (Default: On)
- "Mask Copied Text" setting: Signals to the keyboard to treat copied text as sensitive (Not 100% effective, especially on ChromeOS). (Default: On)
- New "Speak" feature: Choose your preferred voice in settings.
- Other improvements and updates.
That's it for now. Happy screenwriting!
