The take runs itself: the keyboard, the count-in, and a much slower slow

A run of changes to the operator's desk, all pointing the same way: the controls should do what you meant while you're watching the talent rather than the screen.

The shortcuts always drive the prompter now. They used to hand themselves to whatever you clicked last, so setting the speed from the dropdown meant the arrow keys went on adjusting that dropdown, and clicking Play meant the space bar pressed Play again instead of pausing. What makes that safe is that the script pane opens locked. You can still scroll it and copy from it, and the green Edit script button, or a double-click, unlocks it. It locks itself again when you press Play, press Esc, or click outside the script. A brand new script opens ready to type.

The count-in is yours to set, instead of a fixed three seconds that forgot itself on every reload. Count in offers every play, from the top of the script only, or never, and it's saved to your account so it follows you to the next machine. The count now shows in your own preview as well as on the talent's screen, so pressing Play never looks like nothing happened.

You can go a lot slower. The slowest setting used to be one line a second, which is faster than most people talk: ordinary speech is about two and a half words a second, so a line of eight or ten words takes three or four seconds, somewhere around 0.25 to 0.4 lines a second. Every speed you'd actually speak at was below the old floor. The range now starts at 0.1, the steps are fine where reading happens and coarser higher up, and below one line a second the setting also tells you the seconds a line, which is the number you can hear yourself against.

Speed and size are remembered on each script, so a read you tuned by ear over two takes opens that way next time. Set as my default copies what's on screen to your account, and any script you've never tuned follows that default, including ones you make later.

Every take now opens and closes on black. There's a run-up and a run-out of blank lines, so the talent's screen starts empty, the words scroll up into the mark, and at the end they scroll away rather than sitting on the closing line while the room moves. Those lines aren't in your script: nothing is added to what you typed, the word count, or what you export.

When a free session ends, the talent's screen has a big Refresh button. The prompter is usually fullscreen on a tablet clamped to a rig, and getting back in used to mean leaving fullscreen and finding the address bar in front of everyone. Now it's one tap.

Fixed along the way:

• The play button could grey out and refuse to go on. Editing a script shorter, or importing a shorter file, left the prompter parked past the end of the script it now had, which read as a finished take.
• Editing a script and undoing back to how it started saved the version in the middle rather than the original, so a reload brought back the text you had just undone.
• Back and Forward could walk the script off its own end. They stop at the ends now, the status reads END when there's nothing left to roll, and there's a Back to top button on the preview.
• Adjusting the speed or size during a count-in cancelled the count and started the script early.
• The preview could flip to portrait for a moment when a phone on a rig settled after being turned.

Full detail in Controller reference.