Approaching perfection
Ulysses is sometimes dismissed for being pretty. It certainly is that, and the spare beauty of Ulysses’ UI is much of what makes it so alluring. This is an environment you will want to live in, even if the app’s organizational paradigm at first seems unfamiliar for a writing app or you are somewhat irked by the use of markdown tags (As an aside, Ulysses’ layout is very intuitive and closely resembles Mac OS’ Mail app. Also, you can use style sheets that hide the tags, but it’s likely you won’t even notice them after several sessions. You may even come to like them, as I did.)
Ulysses is much more than a pretty face, however. It is a very powerful, very formidable writing environment which allows you to compose and manipulate texts of any kind and any length and export them to as many sources as you can imagine. It also allows you to view and organize all of your writing projects in one easily negotiable sidebar. This is perhaps the one function that Ulysses flat out has over on its chief competitor (and its only bona fide peer), Scrivener. In Scrivener, your view is limited to your current project; in Ulysses you are able to view anything and everything you write.
The genius of Ulysses’ current iteration is reflected in a statement made by Soulman Marcus Fehn in a development diary published during the app’s construction. The Soulmen set out to completely demolish Ulysses’ previous iteration — a klodgy if feature-packed tangle — and completely rebuild it from the first floor. Fehn said the new app should appear simple and inviting to the user at first blush, and only reveal the layers of its complexity and power as the user engages it more. And that is exactly what the experience of using the latest Ulysses does: it draws you in effortlessly as you learn how to have it do what you need it to do.
Although Ulysses and Scrivener are inevitably compared with one another, neither application is perfect — as their respective developers would (and have) acknowledged. Scrivener has more features, simply put. Some have bemoaned the fact that Scrivener comes with a nearly-600 page user manual. But it needs a whopping user manual because Scrivener simply does that much.
Ulysses needs to be able to do more, also simply put. Not much more, just more. Fehn seems to get testy with feature requests, especially ones he fears will render Ulysses less unique (which may mean: more like Scrivener). But Ulysses’ genius is dependant on its power and utility, and not just its beauty. Features which Scrivener currently has and Ulysses does not are the only way to keep that balance, not because Scrivener has them, but because they are necessary to productive writing in a single environment. Some way to bring research documents into Ulysses — web pages, PDFs, and the like — and store them would transform the app, as would the ability to import and split a document composed elsewhere. These are a couple of examples; I could offer several more that in total would make Ulysses as near to perfect as is reasonable to expect in a material world.
A possible irony may be this: I suspect that in its next iteration, Scrivener will look — and perhaps even act — a lot more like Ulysses than it currently does, and if so it will be for a couple of reasons. First, Scrivener’s developer, Keith Blount, is a real admirer of Ulysses and of the Soulmen; he appreciates Ulysses’ singularity and power as a writing tool and he digs the way in which the Soulmen develop software. But the second reason is more fundamental, and is a reflection of Keith’s pragmatic heart: Ulysses works, and it works very well, in ways Scrivener currently does not. And no matter whose idea it was or who thought of it first or who won what award, this is the only thing that matters to the real writers who depend on these tools.
::Ryarianne:: about Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App, v2.6
