Stay in your creative flow with ‘Reading is Fundamental!’

Reading is Fundamental! is an application by Intelligent Assistance that adds a versatile document viewer to the Final Cut Pro user interface.

Sometimes a new project or an edit task uses a brief made up of different kinds of documents. Plain text emails, spreadsheets, presentations. With current Macs it is possible to have the apps that can show these documents open at the same time as Final Cut, but having to continually switch between different applications with different user interfaces can put me off my creative flow.

The Reading is Fundamental! window can hold multiple documents of different types which you can switch between using left and right arrows at the top of the window.

Once you run the application on the same Mac as Final Cut Pro, it adds a button to the Final Cut toolbar so you can bring up its window with a click. Once you have positioned the window to your satisfaction, you can use the Window > Workspaces > Save Workspace As… command to recall its position relative to the other panels of the Final Cut UI.

Its floating window means I can position it wherever I want – so that both the document I need to see and the Final Cut tools I need to work with are visible at the same time.

I especially like using my trackpad to scroll the Reading is Fundamental! window, moving over and scrolling the Final Cut timeline and immediately returning to the Reading is Fundamental! window to scroll again – without tapping to select anything.

It can display:

• PDF
• Word (.doc, .docx),
• Pages
• Excel (.xls and xlsx)
• Numbers
• Comma Separated Values (CSV)
• Keynote
• PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx)
• Plain Text
• Rich Text Format (.rtf and .rtfd)

…and if you need to edit any of the documents it is showing, it can open it in the default app for the document type.

Editors know that staying in ‘the flow’ is vital. Reading is Fundamental! helps Final Cut users cruise through creative flows or glide through repetitive processes.

It requires macOS 10.15 Catalina and is available from the Mac App Store.