Homescreen heroes
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
If you’re a writer of any kind – a blogger, a copywriter, an aspiring novelist or any other kind of word wrangler – you’ll know how important your writing tools can be. In the analogue world I’ll only write seriously with a really nice pen and creamy paper. And in the digital realm, I write exclusively in Ulysses.
What is Ulysses and how much does it cost?
Ulysses enables you to get words out of your brain and onto the page exceptionally quickly and easily, and features a distraction-free interface that hides all the stuff you don’t need so you can concentrate on your words.
It’s blazingly fast. And it enables you to manage even very large projects. I’m currently writing another book with it, and I use it daily for commercial copywriting, news reporting and little snippets like writing author bios, questions for events I’m hosting and logging things I want to remember later.
It’s brilliant on the Mac and on an iPad with an external keyboard, and there’s also an iPhone version so you can access, edit and scribble ideas on the go.
Ulysses isn’t free, but it’s pretty cheap: $39.99 / £39.99 (around AU$60) for an annual plan or £5.99 / $5.99 per month (about AU$9 p/month). Students can also pick it up for $10.99 / £9.99 (or around AU$17) for six months currently.
Why this is my Homescreen Hero
Ulysses is a write-once, publish-anywhere app. It uses Markdown, a form of plain text with simple shortcuts for quickly formatting, linking and structuring documents. Markdown was also designed with speed in mind.
Because the most common shortcuts are all keyboard based – one hash symbol to make text into an H1 heading, two for H2, Command-B for bold and so on – it means I’m not constantly moving to the mouse, which my RSI-addled hands are very happy about.
Because Markdown is plain text there’s very little drain on your system, so Ulysses is blazingly fast on even old Macs. Searching even massive folders is instant, and those plain text files can be opened in pretty much any text app as well as from within Ulysses.
Once you’ve written your words you can export them to pretty much anything in a couple of clicks: to blogging and newsletter platforms such as WordPress, Ghost, Substack and Medium; to the clipboard as plain or rich text; to Microsoft‘s DOCX format; in plain, rich text or Markdown format; in HTML format; as a PDF; or as an ePub.
There are plenty of templates you can use to format those file types, so for example if I’m exporting to DOCX I can go for a simple, plain template; a film script; a newspaper-style column layout and much more. And there are plenty of themes you can use to customize the way Ulysses looks. You can also tweak the interface for light mode, dark mode or a mix of both: I like to have my sidebars dark and my editing window light.
How I use Ulysses
Three alternative writing apps for serious stuff
Scrivener (Mac/PC/iOS)
I’ve used Scrivener for some really heavyweight projects including self-publishing a novel. It’s overkill for everyday writing, I think, but it’s a powerhouse app for book production.
Highland 2 (Mac)
This is a wonderful and very good-looking Mac app for screenwriting and script writing, and it was created by Big Fish and Frankenweenie writer John August.
IA Writer (Mac/PC/iOS)
Like Ulysses, IA Writer is a distraction-free, Markdown-based writing environment. It’s even more minimalist than Ulysses and provides visual writing and style feedback.
The main interface is made up of a main editing window and three sidebars that you can hide or unhide. The very left-hand sidebar is where I organize my projects and folders – so, for example, I’m writing this in my ‘Mags Etc > TechRadar’ folder. It’s a little thing, I know, but I love that I can also customize the sidebar icons and colors.
You can also use folders to break up projects. For example, if you’re working on a book you might have separate folders to store your research, your characters’ backstories and inspirations, or images of possible locations, plus the actual chapters you’re writing. You can also link to external folders on your device or in the cloud.
To the right of the first sidebar there are previews of all the other documents in the current folder, so I can see (and sort or filter) all my other recent TechRadar pieces. The main window shows my words and the current word count, because that’s all I need for most writing jobs.
And the sidebar on the right shows me more stats, and can be switched to show progress towards a word count or deadline, the outline of my current document, the images I’m using in the document or the links I’ve added.
Why I’m recommending Ulysses
To borrow Apple‘s slogan: it ‘just works’ (albeit a little bit slowly when it comes to syncing on my iPad and iPhone).
I’ve tried a lot of writing apps – going way back to the days of WordStar and WordPerfect – and Ulysses is the one that feels like it was made just for me. Not too simple, not too complex, not too demanding and not likely to trash tens of thousands of words and make them unrecoverable, unlike a certain app that rhymes with ‘Nicrosoft Bird’ once did.
The only real downside of using Ulysses for work documents is that some of my work involves dealing with tracked comments and changes, and Ulysses isn’t designed to do that with third parties: you can comment on your documents and projects easily enough, but I haven’t found a way to bring in, say, a client’s heavily amended Word document.
So I still keep a copy of Word kicking around – but Ulysses is the app I use 99% of the time for fiction, non-fiction, commercial and corporate work.
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