Great app but...

I started using this app 2 years ago and I have used it in bunch of periods during these 2 years but not continuously.
I always wanted to use GTD and I thought Ulysses was the magic bullet (i’ve tried Things $70 app and other apps - previously I used to think was the magic bullet).
Ulysses is a great app really well designed easy on the eye. I have a CS background and I really appreciated the “New Filter” idea that automatically filters (old & new) content depending on a new filter.

So why didn’t I use it all the time? It’s obviously got to do with one’s personality. I know people who swear by Things.app which I found myself using purely for storing lists of things (as in, not as a GTD system) and was at some point even happy with Things. So if you are disciplined and stuff, then you can use pretty much any app (even notepad). I’m not disciplined at all in this respect. So for me, I found it “hard" to enter notes and keywords and filtering all that stuff. “Hard” in the sense that it was not fun and it felt like too much effort into bookkeeping — and Ulysses doesn’t transform this process into fun. (Well, whether this is in the scope of Ulysses is a completely different question.) Another thing is that it traps you in the sense that it can be quite tricky to get notes from the command line (or any other program that you’d write — remember my CS background). This means that the filters allowed by Ulysses are highly restricted (in ways one normally doesn’t even realize until you start thinking seriously about it). It’s possible that future versions of Ulysses might have this changed — but this would just mean giving complete programmability to the user with a text representation of everything that’s going on. That would put more burden on the user but it also gives the user unlimited freedom. Anyway, the take-away (for people with some programming background) is that it’s better to store stuff in a directory and write your own filter programs. Org-mode in emacs is a decent “viewer” for your files. This is what I’m using now… I’m still not doing GTD or anything (so that part has remained a constant in my life)… but at least I’m free to think and write my own powerful filters… Hope this helps someone who is thinking about investing $45 to buy this app and investing a lot of time using it.

vranjit about Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App, v2.6