I’ll admit it, I’ve had a sick love/hate relationship with Ulysses for years. I first heard of it by way of Scrivener, my beloved freeform creative writing app. And the Ulysses of then just was not a thing of beauty. The interface had a lot of holdovers from early- or pre-OSX days, and was pretty cluttered (which is quite a statement, given Scrivener’s interface. I love Scrivener, but it’s clearly a tool…look, I’m off topic again.) and unfriendly. I could see some of the power that was inherent in the product, but it just wasn’t for me.

Well, A few days ago Ulysses III released a brand new version, and they nailed it. They took the bold step of abandoning everything they’d done before, threw out the interface entirely, and started over. They took a look at what the OSX world is doing now, in terms of interface, and did that. A very finder-like sidebar gives you access to all your text, organized based on where it lives. (iCloud, on your mac, or, if you have the Daedalus app for iOS, in your Daedalus iCloud folder) Inside each folder you have your texts, (called “sheets”, as in “sheets of paper”) all of which are auto-saved at all times, so you don’t have to worry about hitting ⌘S all the time. It’s a surprisingly slick and easy way to just sit down and write without worrying about filenames or sync options of any such things. You just start writing and worry about organization later, once you’ve got something out there.

The Cons

It’s not all peaches and light, of course. The developers have pointed out that this is a 1.0 release, even if it is called Ulysses III. The app stores its files in .ulysses format, which isn’t interoperable with tools like Marked, which means its a little harder to get previews of your text post-Markdown-rendering. (It’s still quite possible, but not quite easy). It doesn’t natively handle MultiMarkdown, but it exports multimarkdown-compatible footnotes. I’m guessing that the .ulysses file format is a bundle that wraps up all the images and keywords and notes and whatnot, but it does make interoperability with other apps a little harder.

But this is a minor gripe, and isn’t a flaw so much as a design decision that was clearly made with forethought. They decided that Ulysses was written as a creation app. You can share later, but create your text first.

All in all, I’m deeply impressed with the level of polish and attention that went into the latest version, and I’d recommend you pick it up.