Version 2 of Celtx, my favourite free screenwriting app, was released today. Many of the improvements, such as the move to the Firefox 3 codebase, are under the hood, and the end result is an application that looks and behaves pretty much the same as the last version, only a good deal snappier. Which is what you want, really.

The biggest change is server side, and is a whopper. Taking a leaf out of Apple’s studied playback the Celtx team have taken features that were once free, given them a polish, renamed them from Web Services to Celtx Studios, and decided to charge for them. Frankly, I don’t blame them at all.

If you were using Celtx’s free web services to collaborate on projects, each member of your team will now need a $50 annual subscription to a Celtx Studio instead. You can still email scripts around for collaboration, of course, but Celtx Studios offers a tidy, organised online workspace for sharing and back-ups. It’s actually pretty neat, and available as a free beta until March 24th, so you’ve plenty of time to try it out before making the move to Zhura or Scrippd or Scriptbuddy or Fivespockets.

The other major change is support for extensions and other add-ons, that will be part of the Celtx Toolbox. Not sure how this will be used, as very little info has been posted so far, but I imagine we’ll soon see lots of gimmicky random name generators and so forth sprouting up.

Can’t wait for that.

Celtx 2.0 is available for Mac OS 10.4 and above, Windows something or other, and Linux.