Ulysses III

Latte Other Software & Development
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Ulyssess III v1.1 is out, and is much improved.

Aside from the global search (no replace yet), the export has been completely revamped to use CSS-like styles to handle the formatting. Easy to understand, a doddle to use, and infinitely extensible. Very clever stuff.

I’m still not sure about having every piece of text in the same workspace though; I like to keep separate projects separate. After four novels I imagine its going to be pretty unwieldy. It’s also not really geared for storing other stuff like pictures, character sheets, odd bits research etc, which is fair enough because it’s being sold as a pure writing tool and nothing else.

Well worth a look, just for the fantastic export functions.

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I upgraded yesterday and exported a few articles I’d written as would-be chapters of a book that will never be commissioned using the `send to i-Book’ export function, just for, y’know, fun …

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Ulysses III has reached version 1.2, and it’s a really nice upgrade.

Highlights:

The style exchange, which should take a lot of the drudgery out of creating layouts for export.

The goals functionality is a stunning piece of UI work; simple and versatile.

It’s my first choice for shorter work, but the philosophy behind it means that I still prefer Scrivener for novel-length pieces.

A few niggles and bugs, but it’s coming along very nicely. :smiley:

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In the past few days, I tried out Ulysses III. Very pleasant experience. Very elegant user interface, which really deserves an award. And very well advertised on their, again beautiful, website.

But definitely no tool for academic writing. Nor for writing complex novels. Ulysses III is for …… well, I think for people who don’t write too long and too complex things, for whom design is really important, who love the way in which certain features are tucked away, and so on.

A horse for a ride in the countryside. But no horse for ploughing the land, for going into battle, for crossing the desert.

I feel sorry to say this, but I liked the old Ulysses better.

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Currently half price in mac app store…

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Thought I’d share this:

davidhewson.com/2014/10/writing-ulyssesiii/

Hewson’s writing a book about Ulysses III.

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I have to agree with Timotheus here. I really wanted to like Ulysses, as design is "really important " for me, the design is beautiful, and sometimes I do crave a simpler experience than Scrivener provides (probably an unavoidable consequence of Scrivener’s greater flexibility and number of options). But even though I use very few of Scrivener’s many features, those I use are important to my preferred workflow. Maybe I just couldn’t figure out how to do it, but even a couple of fairly basic functions (like displaying two texts side by side, one holding notes, the other the article I’m writing) proved either difficult or impossible. And some of the pretty design I was able to replicate in Scrivener via preferences.

Maybe I didn’t give it enough of a chance (just wrote a few medium length stories with it), but I failed to find anything Ulysses could accomplish that I couldnt already do with my current combo of IaWriter and Scrivener, and several things I wanted to do , and that I can do easily enough with the current set up , but couldn’t in Ulysses, at least not easily. Maybe it’s just that after using Scrivener for so long and so productively, I’ve just adjusted to its way of doing things, or maybe it’s that Scrivener allows me to work the way I prefer: writing in chunks that can be easily rearranged.

That said, I’d love to have a Markdown friendly mode in Scrivener, to save me the step of exporting to Writer, but it’s hardly a big deal. I can use the basic Markdown syntax in Scrivener, export to Writer, and it’ll format accordingly.

I always worry, with Ulysses as well as Scrivener, that I’m just not using the app to its fullest, and there are probably ways to bend Ulysses to my will, or change my way of working to a more efficient and Ulysses-comporting method. Maybe a future version will add what I need. But really, Scrivener already does exactly what I need it to do, in part because Keith has added features I and others requested, and I don’t see anything in Ulysses that would allow me to do those things more easily, or that adds features or capabilities that I need and that Scrivener doesn’t provide.
I certainly appreciate the Ulysses designers’ excellent work, and I,m sure it’s ideal for many writers, better and easier to master than the complex Scrivener. But from what I can tell so far, for my needs, Scrivener is currently a much better match, and I feel very fortunate that Keith created it for writers like me.

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I haven’t even tried Ulysses. With all due respect to the developers — who, clearly from all the comments, have done an excellent job — I really don’t need it. I do virtually everything in Scrivener, and Scrivener allows me to do it the way I’m happy with. Any, short, one or two page, one-off things I have to write I do in Nisus, where I have templates set up for those specific purposes.

And I don’t worry about the fact that I only use a fraction of Scrivener’s capabilities … you might like to look at my post in

to see how long it took me to use Scrivener as more than just a kind of typing-processor where I could have two documents open side by side in a single interface. The thing is, Scrivener allows me to write what I want to write in the way that suits me. I don’t even use NWP ’to its fullest’ … in both, I use those features that I have found a need for and only learn others when it suddenly hits me that I could make good use of some as yet untried feature. I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable using an app that required me to work its way, or one that I had to ‘bend to my will’. I’ve met those in the past and our relationship was always short-lived.

So, I’m sure Ulysses is a great app for those who find a need or use for it, but I’m not in that camp.

:slight_smile:

Mr X

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I have to step in here at this point and share my own personal experiences with Ulysses 3. I have been a long time Scrivener user, first off, and I’ve praised it up and down to everyone I could. I would swear by it, all throughout Grad School. And I give Scrivener much respect as a brilliant piece of software for writers.

Then I began to discover something about the way that I write. I’ve never been a planner. I would have one central idea (I guess a Writer’s Statement) and I would begin my novel heading toward that idea, or even building up around it. It’s off the cuff. And the most important thing to me was just writing. Yet often times, while in RTF software, I would find myself spending more time formatting and setting type and forcing outlines, and all these distractions that kept me from writing.

Then I discovered Ulysses 3. Not only is it geared toward getting the writing down, it makes it easy and brings the joy back. I found myself writing more with Ulysses and my productivity as a novelist increased. It was like a re-birth. I began seeing my projects through to their ends, instead of abandoning them halfway through bogged down under over-planning.

This year I have decided to do NaNoWriMo with Ulysses and so far it’s been a smashing success for me.

With the way Ulysses is set up there’s a “Library” instead of a “Binder”… you can divide it—make groups, filters, chapter sheets, all the necessary tools you need to organize your novel. I find the UI simply breathtaking, and the themes are easy to set, there’s only the preferences you need, no more no less. It’s streamline and deft. It is strictly geared to sticking the writing down. And stick it does.

As far as those who say it is best for short pieces… I strongly disagree with that, and I am living proof that it can handle large novels. I even threw in my 275,000 word opus into it, and am giving it a thrice over in the editing process. Ulysses is formidable.

And as far as output, there are style templates in the exporting process. You can select from various purposes—it will save your work in a novel submission, article submission, French Novel format and many more: styles.ulyssesapp.com. It formats itself in the exporting process. It can convert your plain text sheets and projects to Word docs, RTF docs, and Text Edit, or HTML.

And as far as the split screen and two documents side by side. In Ulysses you can do this by opening one of your projects in a window, resize it, and open your other document and resize it… and you can have two documents on the same screen side by side. Pretty simple.

One more thing… I don’t understand why some people post reviews upon never using a product, or even only scratching the surface of it. I have used both Ulysses and Scrivener throughout large projects and both of them are incredible. And I don’t ever plan on abandoning Scrivener forever. I plan on coming back to it from time to time, and I look forward to the strides that Scrivener makes in the future, and I especially look forward to their IOS app. But for now, I have found my home and writer’s studio in Ulysses 3.

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Thanks for this report. I definitely know what you mean about the formatting paralysis, which is why I like using iAWriter so much – no choices! And that’s why I’ve set up Scrivener (which admittedly took quite awhile) in a way that frees me from having to make those choices again. Of course, a writer who owns neither app might have to account for that formatting paralysis in making a choice between Scrivener and Ulysses.

I’d love to hear more about how our fellow Scriveners are using Ulysses, especially if they can detail specific steps in the process, and what Ulysses does for them that Scrivener doesn’t. I don’t know what Keith thinks, but I’d also welcome specific suggestions about what aspects of the Ulysses experience/UI Scrivener might adopt.

As for why

The answer is: I’m trying help my fellow Scriveners by sharing MY experience with Ulysses. Maybe I was able to only scratch the surface, but I spent as much time with Ulysses as its free trial period and my experimentation time would allow. I actually make my living through my writing, and need to devote most of my time to actually writing rather than experimenting with software preferences, and I expect many of the other working writers here would face the same limits, so I hoped to save them some time by sharing my experience. Then I spent more than a little more time that I could otherwise be using to earn money instead sharing the results (with appropriate caveats so readers can judge them accordingly) in the hope that reporting my limited experience would be more valuable to some of my fellow Scriveners than not reporting anything at all. That’s why I invited others who used Ulysses more than I was able to to weigh in as well.

The only way to experiment further would be to drop $30 or $50 on the app, and even then I can’t see what it would do for me that I can’t already do with the way I’ve set up Scrivener. Still, I’d love to hear from Ulysses users how they use the app in ways that Scrivener doesn’t permit (or makes more difficult), and if I hear about some capability it offers that Scrivener doesn’t and might be useful to me, I’d be happy to join Ulysses on another test voyage.

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And I was not "posting a review upon never using a product”. I was responding to Brett’s perfectly valid comment about his experience of Ulysses 3, adding my basic agreement with his position while disagreeing on the question of using all the features of an app and on software that requires you to work its way, or, to use a different metaphor culled from a long ago thread in the Linux forum, one “which I have to beat into submission”. Nor was I intending to imply that I presumed Ulysses would come into either of those latter categories — having made it clear that I’d not tried Ulysses, I would never have done such a thing.

I am happy for you and anyone else who have now found that Ulysses 3 suits your needs better than Scrivener does. That I prefer to have my source text and translation open as different panes in the same application interface, rather than two windows opened in the same program — as I used to have with NWP — that is simply a personal preference, and the first feature that wedded me to Scrivener.

Mr X

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The reason I switched from Scrivener to Ulysses is that it has an iOS app that syncs easily and reliably with the Mac app. The sync between Scrivener and various iOS apps never really seemed to work properly. Files were doubled or deleted etc…
I prefer a minimalist UI so Ulysses works well for me in this respect; Scrivener also worked well for me as it is so adaptable. I mainly used the full screen view.
Also: Ulysses is all Markdown which syncs very, very quickly. Another plus for me.
I like Scrivener very much and I really appreciate Keith’s work which I have told him several times. It’s just that I needed good syncing.

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I had good experiences with syncing Scrivener with WriteRoom, ByWord or Nebulous Notes via an external folder. Obviously, you have to think plain text/markdown when writing in Scrivener.

The reason why I’m testing Ulysses is that it is gorgeous looking, and Daedalus Touch is an interesting new concept. Plus, it seems integration between Mac and iPad/iPhone was done the right way. And it is the ideal Markdown editor when needed. However, I still feel that Scrivener is a more complete solution (something that might be a minus when you only need a place to write).

If only Scrivener had the Binder selection automatically syncronized with the selected document in the Editor, and used text styles as semantic indicators (rather than just visual embellishments), I doubt I would need anything else. But I would still use Ulysses from time to time for how beautiful it looks.

Paolo

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Thank goodness for Ulysses. I’ve been using it since its reincarnation as Ulysses III and find it the ideal solution for my multi-valent and “weird” writing. It has an elegant interface, uses Markdown and.txt files, and is nimble and nomadic. I have seamless syncing with my iPad, upon which I now do 75% of my work going to my MacBook and external display for working with images and video.

I was an early adopter of Scrivener and had 6 or 8 multi-year projects in it but I cringed every time I launched it. I knew it wouldn’t be long before its interface reduced me to near-tears.

I’m happy for all of those who love Scrivener but it just doesn’t fit me and the way I work. I extracted what I needed from my Scrivener files and finally threw away the app last month.

Ulysses has, for me, restored the joy of writing.

(Related to using Ulysses, I made the decision “a while” ago to work with .txt files, not proprietary formats, and I started using nvALT to manage all manner of information, notes, workflow notes and course materials for the courses I teach. nvALT also syncs like a dream with my iPad, using Byword and has become my most used app. I followed the method of Michael Schecter of “A Better Mess” and use keyboard shortcuts to assign a topic-title-date name to each file so projects clump together.)

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My Grandma used to tell me that it was bad manners to p** on the carpet as I walked out the door.

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And did your grandma have reasons to tell you that, I mean, in your case? :laughing:

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Actually, I think it’s OK to politely tell Keith and the rest of us why Scrivener didn’t work as well as something else for some users. It might help them in planning Scriv’s evolution. And no one ever claimed Scrivener would ever be the best tool for everyone, or even for Scrivener users in all cases.

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Actually, the definition of this subforum states:

This is a very open community indeed! In fact, It’s very rare to find a developer willing to host other people’s software --and even for competing apps comments in a formal space.

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Even though I don’t use Scrivener at this time (while eagerly waiting for the iOS version) I keep coming back to this forum almost daily as it offers so much useful information about many topics related to writing. This is a great place. We should respect the proprietor of the house and, no, we should not p*** on the carpet.

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Yes, I hear this occasionally and always find it a little bit odd. There is nothing in Scrivener that forces you to do this. I open it up, pick a template (or not) and just go.

Unlike Scrivener, Ulysses cannot handle automatic chapter headings/numbering and the page numbering is a little rigid. It supports a small number of paragraph types and I can’t add my own. Although Keith always denies it, Scrivener can compile a book of several hundred pages into different formats without having to use a word processor to typeset a single thing. I started the current book with Ulysses, but when I found that I would have to manually number all the chapter numbers myself, I went straight back to Scrivener.

I’m also not sure about having all my writing projects in a single database, but that is a personal preference more than anything else.

I’m a big fan of the CSS stylesheet system that Ulysses uses, but again, I find that small changes to the layout are a lot quicker in Scrivener.

But the typography in the Ulysses editor cannot be beaten. I’m not sure but I don’t think that’s a native framework they’re using; there’s no other app quite like it. I’d love to see it in Scrivener, but I imagine that would be a lot of work.

That’s a fair comment, but if you pick up a new app, the first thing you do is try the most important things you used in your old app. If the new app can’t do them then it’s an immediate deal breaker.