Ulysses: заметки и блокно‪т‬ 4+

An Elegant Alternative to Scrivener

I use Ulysses for writing ficiton. I was a Scrivener user for years. It's a powerful program that reminds me in some ways of Photoshop - incredibly powerful yet complex in ways I often never get around to using. The #1 reason I choose to write in Ulysses is the ability to sync and access my Ulysses projects from all my Mac devices - iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro. This is where Scrivener falls apart - their iPad app is a different program, and syncing across multiple devices requires third party programs and platforms ... and then it still doesn't work that great. I can write anywhere, anytime. My other favorite feature is being able to write in Markdown -- so with two keyboard clicks, I can leave inline notes to myself within the text that do not export to the finished document and don't exist in a sidebar. The simplicity of the design in relationship to the variety of function is great. Two feature requests - I still use Pacemaker for project wordcount setting and goal keeping. I'd love it if Ulysses' in app goal setting features were so robust. I also wish the color coding on keywords was more saturated/ high contrast, and that colors could be assigned to elements in the Library.

I’m in love with this writing app (update)

Finally, a program where I can keep my academic writing drafts and reading notes in a single uncluttered, easy-to-use environment. I love the simple markdown commands, which keep me writing without constantly having to stop to mouse over to a toolbar or open a menu window. I encountered only one problem in my initial use of the program, which was that my block quotes kept appearing center-justified and in italics after export (this is not a typical format in publications in my humanities discipline). When I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the quotes to come out in normal font style and left-justified, I wrote to customer support for help. Within 24 hours I received clear instructions for solving the problem by changing the style sheet, and now I know how to change other formatting issues in the style sheet should they arise. ***UPDATE: I've been using the app now for a couple of years and although I'm not making any particularly high-tech use of it (I don't blog or otherwise publish online using my own markup), but it continues to serve my academic needs extremely well. It's a keeper!

Ответ разработчика ,

Thank you for your kind review. We are very happy you like writing with Ulysses. Thanks for sharing your feedback with others and supporting our work with your subscription! —Alex

Not my thing

Apps with non-standard UIs and I just don't tend to get along. I use most apps in fits and starts, and that's certainly true of Ulysses. If I wrote for a living, or maybe even if I journaled every day, it'd be different - I'd be using the app pretty much daily and wouldn't have a chance to forget all its peculiarities. But I don't write every day; I write when I feel inspired to, and that might be every day for three days in a row or for a week, and then I won't feel the need to write again for a month, and therein lies the problem with apps with non-standard UIs: when I launch an app with a non-standard UI after that month of not using it, I've completely forgotten how it works and I need to go through a tutorial all over again if I want to use it. Which is not something I'm willing to do for any app that's not essential to my life. And for me personally, the value of a pretty UI and having no visual distractions while writing is nowhere near so great that I would think it worth my while to re-school myself on how to use Ulysses all over again every time I forget.

The whole idea behind the Mac is that computing should be intuitive, and Ulysses is not. So I'm most likely done with it and will be going back to Word or some other app that I know how to operate when I open it, no matter how long it's been since I last used it.