The popular open source media pre-production tool Celtx has reached the 1.0 milestone. Popular for its screenplay-writing, scheduling, and budgeting tools, Celtx has been in a lengthy beta for over 2 years. Used extensively by independent film producers in a number of language, Celtx, based on Mozilla’s XUL framework, has long been an integral member of the open source media toolkit.

Celtx is a media pre-production editor that allows you to easily create screenplays and storyboards for your next movie. You can use it to create a whole assortment of media, including theater, comics, advertising, and video games.

It took decades of writing, but I’ve come to a realisation: word processors do way more than what I need. And so I started to wonder: why should I be doing my writing with software designed to make it easy to arrange text for being printed out on letter-sized pieces of paper? Why can’t I find software that just lets me write?

After years of perpetual beta (it's vogue these days), Celtx, the open source media pre-production and screenwriting application, finally earned its 1.0 status this past June. So it might seem a little odd that only eight months later, Celtx is making the jump to 2.0 (and it does seem a little sudden) so let's take a look and see if this new version worth its version number.

The best way to write or compose something important using a computer is to do it without any distraction. But how is it possible to concentrate if your email notification keeps on popping, your Twitter updates are flashing, and you are always tempted to open your RSS reader? What’s my solution?

The never-ceasing distractions of tweets, pokes on Facebook, Gmail spam to review are all enemies of writing. Was there ever an activity assailed by the vampires of impetuosity as much as writing?

Some of you have emailed to ask what I am using to write the Art Of Community, and some of my Free Software friends out there have been asking if Free Software tools were used when writing the content. Oh yes. :)

For a lot of programmers, writing an application is fun, but writing its manual is not. Adding new features, refining the product, and responding to users' input are all more rewarding than writing instructions on how to use the software. However, good documentation is necessary to have happy, informed users who can contribute meaningfully to future development.

In the beginning, the idea that software should be free was deemed unrealistic and laughable, and then unworkable. Now, for the most part, it is deemed acceptable and desirable – not just as a workable approach to writing software, but as a means of writing better software.