No longer fits my needs
I have used Ulysses for several years, and at the time it was probably the best of its kind. It is stable, reliable, and syncs flawlessly using iCloud. However, here is what is missing in Ulysses that is now available in some of its newer competitors:
No formatted text option. I know some usres love markdown but there is a ton of similar apps that use markdown. What about those of us who use Ulysses primarily for taking notes, planning projects, commenting on events and issues, capturing and organizing information from online sources and other things that are not meant for publishing but for having electronic/digital records only? We like to have a pleasant page layout with control over fonts and colors. Other competing apps offer several options (formatted documents, plain text, and markdown), so why not Ulysses?.
No option to insert tables in documents.
No checklists; most other notes apps offer tables and checklists.
Search is a bit confusing. I find myself most of the time searching for a something and not foinding only to find out the my search was limited to the note I am viewing.
Out of frustration, I moved all my notes and documents out of Ulysses to another app which offers all the features that are missing from Ulysses. I have not yet deleted my subscription on the hope that some newer version would address my issues soon.
Response from developer
Thank you for your feedback. We are a universal writing environment based on Markdown. We developed Markdown XL (our very own markup language) specifically to make writing more focused and more productive. By making it possible to distinguish between writing the text itself and formatting it during export, Markdown XL is one of the main factors that enable our distraction-free writing environment (others being our minimalistic design and intuitive interface, for example). We are sorry to hear that you don't like to use the app, though. The editor is supposed to be minimalistic so writers can concentrate on writing and are not distracted by the optics of their texts. The way your text looks in the editor has nothing to do with what it looks like after exporting it. With Ulysses, you can fully customize your exported document, adjust fonts, color, font size. We are happy to show you how this is done. There are also some tutorials on our website if you'd like to check them out: ulysses.app/styles/ Also, there are many export styles available for download here: styles.ulysses.app You'll find some themes there, too. With themes you can alter the look of your editor. Regarding your feature request, I've +1'd the feature request for the option to display full-size images in your name, so please consider your vote counted. I can't make any promises as to when or whether we will implement this, but your feedback is highly appreciated. In case of further questions, don't hesitate to reach out directly via help@ulysses.app —Andrea
Excellent app, but...
However, and this is huge for me, I write a lot of business documents, and I simply can't use it for this purpose as there is no support for tables.
I live in hope that this feature is just around the corner, but until support for tables arrives, I simply can't give it the five stars that it otherwise deserves.
Response from developer
Thank you for leaving a review and being a long-time supporter of our work! I've counted your vote for table support. You might be happy to hear that tables are our top priority now. However, it is a complex feature so I cannot give you an ETA yet. If there's anything else we can help you with, please let us know: help@ulysses.app. —Andrea
Missing only one thing from Scrivener
Misleading on App Store
Apps offered on the App store should differentiate between free trials, like this, and basic versions that don't expire but can be upgraded whenever you want.
There's a difference between offering in-app purchases and requiring them, and there's a difference between offering an app for £50, and paying that much year after year.
Response from developer
We are sorry about the confusion! We have opted for a free download with in-app purchases so that we can offer a fully functional trial version. Ulysses uses the standard App Store trial provided by Apple, which can be canceled at any time up to 24 hours before the 14-day trial period expires. Given the large feature set of Ulysses, we feel the price of our subscription is justified. It is a professional writing environment with incredible organizational capabilities, a fully customizable export, the ability to set writing goals and an option to publish blog posts to major platforms like WordPress. Also, Ulysses comes with an advanced grammar check on par with Grammarly. A full list of features can be found on our website: ulysses.app/features If you have any further questions, suggestions or requests, please don't hesitate to contact us directly: help@ulysses.app —Antje
A superb app well worth the subscription
Response from developer
Thank you so much for your review and for taking the time to write it — we really appreciate it! It's great to hear Ulysses helped you in your creative process, for example your blog posts. We hope you will continue to enjoy using Ulysses for much longer. Great to have you on board! If there's anything we can help you with, please let us know: help@ulysses.app. —Max.
Excellent app for all kinds of writing
Everything you need for writing.
Ulysses manages ot do that rare thing of being super simple and yet feature packed at the same time. The focus mode is really great and the clean miminal interface is really conducive to getting work done. You have all the export options you need, including quick and easy ways to export directly into Wordpress and Medium.
I also love the may you can tag all your pieces and then create smart filters. There are actually a lot of features that I don't even use, but these don't get in the way. I can't imagine I'll ever find anything better, which makes it worth every penny.
Response from developer
Thank you for leaving a review! We are happy you like the minimal interface and appreciate what it does during the writing process: It helps you focus knowing that all the features that make a writer's life easier are there for you if you need them. Thanks for sharing your experience with others. Very much appreciated! Regarding sync issues, they are oftentimes related to the iCloud background service not working properly. If you would like to give iCloud another try, please go to all the steps in our iCloud FAQ: ulys.app/icloud Should the issues persist, please get in touch with us directly via help@ulysses.app so we can take a closer look. —Andrea
Stellar for Writing
I like it
Ulysses lets me have all three of these needs met in one program. And lets me do one thing - write. I don't need to mail merge with 1400 clients a la Word, and I do not need 5000 ways to look at my project a la Scrivener. I like the idea of going in and with a couple remembered codes hack away for an hour or two without letting go of the keys.
Also Ulysses has more functionality than a lot of Markdown apps I tried. I couldn't get most of them to even indent the first sentence of a paragraph!
A winner of a prgram!
Keyboard shortcuts please!
The actual writing is a joy, I just really really wish the annotation and editing experience was more thoughtful.
Specificaly:
- keyboard shortcuts for adding annotations (striking out a passage) are tortuous to find and implement.
- In review mode, there is no way to easily select and act on an annotation. Attempting to remove a "deleted" passage of text can easily turn into removing what you want to save, if you aren't careful becuase of how the annotations are placed.
- There is no option to "select all" of a certain kind of annotation.
These are not minor complaints, and would really improve the reliability of this writing tool.
A minor issue is that if you select a page that is glued to another - you can see the pages stats if you click the stats icon in the page list, but not in the right hand stats bar. This is a bit confusing.
Over all I really love this app and am glad for the recent improvements in statistics (not counting annotations in word counts etc). I just really need keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to take actions on annotations.
