Still the best

When Scrivener released an iOS app, I decided to give Scrivener another look, both on the desktop and mobile. It’s a solid app all around, and the iOS app is amazingly solid for a first release. But after a few days of tooling around in it I went back to Ulysses.

Ulysses has a few advantages over Scrivener at least for the way I like to work:

First, its UI is amazing. It’s beautiful, minimal, and you can tell that The Soulmen sweat the details. It gives you just enough flexibility to customize it to your taste, and then it just gets out of your way and lets you work. Scrivener’s UI is nice, but feels dated. The iOS app is better, but both versions simply give you too many options spread over too many windows and pop-ups that interact in odd ways. You set up default styles to control the look of your text, including text color, but the colors for everything else are in a completely separate window. And after spending all your time fidling with styles, those styles aren’t applied on export. It’s a sensible model, both Ulysses and Scrivener separate content from structure, but in many ways Scrivener *looks* like a word processor. That’s a huge win for Ulysses in my estimation.

Second, I prefer how Ulysses handles exporting. I have some experience with web design, so the model that treats structure and presentation differently, and I like the stylesheet approach. Your mileage may vary, but I find this approach significantly more sensible and clear than Scrivener’s “window with a thousand options” approach.

Finally, syncing. Ulysses iCloud syncing is the most solid syncing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve never lost a word, and changes are reflected almost instantly. Scrivener uses Dropbox, which is all well and good, but its syncing is far too manual, and too easy to break by accident.

Obviously, Ulysses isn’t perfect, and there are absolutely things that Scrivener does better. Scrivener may be a better choice for you in the following cases:

You gather a lot of research. Scrivener will store files of any type in your project folder, and its split screen view makes referencing that research fairly simple (thgouh you have to dig through menus to do things like lock one of the panes). I’d love for Ulysses to get a split screen mode, but it’s not a big deal. More important, for me, would be the ability to view images and other attachments without having to open them in a different window. I’m not sure how this would work, given that Ulysses is a plain text editor and attaches images rather than embedding them, but it would be a game changer for me if they could figure it out.

You like working on coarkboards. Ah, Scrivener’s corkboard, the one and only feature that gives me pause about uninstalling Scrivener. If only Ulysses had a similar view, where sheets could be viewed as cards and organized visually, it would be nearly perfect.

And that’s it, really. Better handling of images and a cork board like feature would make Ulysses totally perfect for my needs.

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