A few weeks ago I wrote here about Ulysses, a long-standing but until lately rather obscure Mac writing app that got into the current trend for minimal, Markdown long before the whole thing became fashionable. I cited it as an increasingly interesting, if still a little eccentric, piece of software that offered a different way of doing things to the much better-known Scrivener.
Well Ulysses III has just had a major update to Version 1.2. You can cut the ‘eccentric’ bit now. The Soulmen, the app’s developers, have clearly started listening to users. This is a very big update and one that in my book raises Ulysses along Scrivener to the ranks of ‘software worth buying a Mac to have’. Yes, I know Scrivener is out for Windows too, and very good as well. But the Mac version is still, for now, in several key ways superior.
Anyway back to Ulysses and some of the significant improvements in this new free update.
Scene splitting
You know that Scrivener trick where you find yourself writing a scene that’s too long and demands to be split into two? With Scrivener it’s just a command away. Now it is with Ulysses too — and you can merge scenes as well, just as you can with Scrivener.
Goals
You can set yourself targets for individual scenes, sections and entire manuscripts. In words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines or pages. The goal ‘HUD’ is very simple and beautifully designed. You can rip it off and keep it on screen if you like. There’s also a small ‘progress so far’ icon for the document itself in the sidebar too. Lovely…
Keywords
Ulysses had keywords before but now they’re a bit more obvious and you can view them more easily, like this. You can set up filters to narrow down the sheets you view too. So you could easily set up something like Scrivener’s Collections routine to focus on a particular storyline, location or character this way.
Quick Open
Ulysses stores all its text files within itself. By which I mean there aren’t conventional folders on your Mac. So you can set up your entire library of text documents on iCloud if you like and they will sync across different Macs without a second thought. There’s a very quick way to browse through all these documents now. A simple Command-O brings up the window above which gives you snapshots of your available documents to scroll through. Type in any word in the top field and you get documents containing it immediately.
There are other new features too. You can read the details at the end of this post. The Soulmen call this ‘The User Requests Update’. It looks that way too — I particularly like the fact they’ve made it possible to make the line selection bar in typewriter mode optional now, since this was something that bugged me quite a bit.
So where does Ulysses stand next to Scrivener? For me Scrivener is the Swiss Army knife of Mac writing apps. It’s a powerful piece of software that can handle everything from basic writing to heavy duty research, storing pdfs and video. Add in professional-level publication processes and it’s quite a powerhouse.
Ulysses III, on the other hand, is a simple, very focused scalpel. It’s about writing and pretty much writing alone.
Given they’re both inexpensive products — $45 for Mac Scrivener and $44.99 for Ulysses — I can see a home for both on the Mac of anyone who works with words for a living. For a complex book with lots of threads and perspectives I suspect Scrivener is the undoubted winner. For something simpler Ulysses could be just the trick.
You can find a demo for the new Ulysses 1.2 here and the demo for Scrivener here. Judge for yourself.
## Ulysses 1.2 – The User Requests Update
FEATURES:
- Added split & merge for sheets.
- Added goals to sheets and groups.
- Added keyword editing to sheet list.
- Added options to show goal, modification date and keywords in sheet list.
- Sheets can now be sorted by date and first character(s).
- Number of preview lines in sheet column is now adjustable.
- Added sharing of styles and themes on Ulysses Style Exchange.
- Color palettes can now be created and edited within Ulysses.
- Reworked theme section of preferences.
ENHANCEMENTS:
- Added a Quick Open option for opening from the currently selected group.
- Keywords can now be added to sheets in External Sources as Mavericks tags.
- Dark sidebars can now be enabled independently of Pure Mode.
- Line highlight can now be enabled independently of Typewriter Scrolling.
- Added average words/sentence and sheet count to Statistics HUD.
- Added preview to export styles.
- Added options for disallowing orphans and widows in Ulysses Style Sheets.
- Improved print settings.
- Improved error handling for file operations.
- Allow dragging of doc/docx files directly into Ulysses.
BUGFIXES:
- Fixed problem when changing case of file names in external sources.
- Fixed a crash when resuming editing of a style item.
- Fixed crash when deleting multi-stage input text in inline tags.
- Improved editor stability.
Filed under: Web/Tech, Writing Tagged: Ulysses