Ulysses Mobile

The old version was the best writing app that existed. Period. The new one is an expensive subscription-based one.

I absolutely love Ulysses. I’ve been a writer most of my life, both for money and for fun, and Ulysses is the easiest way I’ve ever found to get the words out of my brain, through my fingers and onto a page. It’s gently intuitive, full-featured, and packed with amazing little bits o’ wonder that make writing a joy. Well, it’s a joy, other than all the other bits of my brain trying to make it harder than it should be.

It’s dope.

And so many useful features. I am a huge fan and also use Ulysses on my iPad.

There really isn’t anything that I don’t like. I’ve written over a million words in this app over the last 6-7 years. The developer just keeps making it better. Sometimes updates don’t get implemented perfectly, but they keep at it until it’s right. From time to time I experiment with other writing apps, but I always come back. A perfect, light weight, but featured, text editor. Highly recommended.

Ulysses presents me with a minimalistic toolset to write. It is out of the way until I need it. When I organise my work, it’s well thought through. I like that I can write in markdown, and it displays text very well. It does all this, and keeps my content well organised across several devices.

I first started using “Ulysses III” back in Spring 2013. It was such a revelation at the time, from its library-based design to its Markdown XL syntax. Almost ten years on, with iOS and iPadOS versions, iCloud and external storage support, beautiful export styles, code fences, and now table editing, Ulysses stands tall as one of the most essential and beloved apps I have ever used.

This once was a fantastic, lean writing machine. Now each release adds bloat and barriers to productivity. Please get back on track with a quality product for professionals and leave the gimmicky stuff behind. (Sketches? Ugh, please. Fix the global Search that was broken by Projects.)

I like this program and use it to write. I wish it had regular expression search and replace, though. Who knows, maybe it does! The one thing that is not too convenient is printing. First you have to export, but not all export works to print. So, I export to PDF, and THEN I print from the preview. That works. I like to print because it is my belief people enjoy getting mail. If you want to send someone a message that you want them to enjoy getting, and they don’t feel like it is work they have to respond to right away like email, print it and mail it in the post! Ulysses is designed on a slightly different plane than that, but I still would like it to be easier to print. I do like Ulysses, though, and I use it. Update: the new Project capability shows promise, and it easy to use. The “Extras” let me take some notes about a particular project and keep the notes with the project, and it was very easy to get into this.

Elegant, useful, and very useful.