Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App App Reviews

It’s a pleasure to write using Ulysses. I’ve used the beast Scrivener, and then a host of other lean apps claiming to be "distraction free" that ultimately were just featureless or bossy. Ulysses strikes the difficult design balance of being both lean when you want it, and feature rich where you need it. Really it does. And it now works across all of your Apple stuff. I use it from OS X to iPad Pro, and I’m even getting warmer to editing on the iPhone. I have no excuse now not to be writing. Gee thanks guys! Simply an amazing app even if they dont know that the Ulysses butterfly is blue... ;^)

I purchased Ulysses for my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I’m in my mid 70’s and wanting to share with my children and grandchildren moments from our families past. How often do you hear people comment that they wish they had talked more with a parent or other relative about their life and what it was like to live through… Ulysses is super for writing at odd moments when a memory surfaces that I’d like to record. Whatever relative or location it pertains to I can add it to the existing file and not have any hassles about combining files or losing an entry. Very pleased to have the tools to implement this “nostalgia machine."

This app keeps me sane. It really does.

Ulysses does two things very well: its simplicity gets out of your way and allows you to create, and its elegance and beauty provide a pleasing environment in which to create. Everything about this app feels polished and loved, and it doesn’t clutter things up with unnecessary or extraneous functionality. I use this app in conjunction with the iOS app, as I often write on my iPad with an external keyboard. The iCloud syncing has been a breeze, and I use the backup function to ensure my work is kept safe. The minimalist markdown functionality allows a simple and easy-to-remember way to mark up your text with simple concepts like emphasis and headers, and doesn’t distract you from the writing flow by launching you into an alternate universe of formatting options. I’ve never had issues with crashing or bugs, and I’ve put hundreds of hours of use into Ulysses. I can’t recommend Ulysses enough. Try it out for yourself and see what you think.

One word: elegance. I adore this app and its iOS counterpart. Syncing is flawless and the writing environment is perfection.

I wanted to like Ulysses, and it seemed a natural fit since I do most of my short-form writing in Byword and longer work in Scrivener. But in practice it shows a lot of shortcomings. Markdown is great if you are wriiting a 300 word piece for a website, but in practice I found using characters for formatting rather than as characters constantly got in the way of my writing flow. Pasting from PDFs or any rich text creates extra work correcting smart quotes, ellipses, etc. that don’t transfer into a plain text format correctly. There’s no way to view footnotes inilne while writing. Comments disappear when exporting to Word. Lots of little annoyances that slow down writing in practice, especially if your writing involves drawing together quotations etc. from many other documents in mixed formats. Tried it repeatedly given all the hype & every time I end up moving the project into something else.

I will do a full review in good time. For now I wanted to send in this quick review to support the developers. If you are serious about writing, you cannot go wrong with this. This software dissapears in the background to remove any distractions and impediments to getting actual writing done. Cross platform syncing works like a charm. The developers website has an entry in their blog that lists the rave reviews and awards the app has won. Download the demo, and Write On!