As NaNoWriMo drew near last year, I wrote a comparison of StoryMill and Scrivener. Both have undergone minor revisions in the last year and are still worth a look for the aspiring NaNoWriMo’er. But…
There is also Ulysses to consider. Ulysses 2.0 was released in recent months as an upgrade to an already worthy writing program. I’ve been putting Ulysses 2.0 through the paces and it offers a great user experience. Read on…and don’t miss the Ulysses 2.0 license giveaway at the end.
A screenshot of a Ulysses project is below. Each project consists of as many documents as you would like. Each document is defined by the main text of that document (pictured in the center window), and any notes related to the document (on the upper right). Of course, a large project might have many documents, so they can manually be sorted into collections, or automatically filtered using whatever criteria you use. For further organization, groups can contain collections, filters, or even other groups.
Visually, the interface is very simple to allow you to focus on getting thoughts formed. And it can get simpler by collapsing all the sidebars so all you see is a text editor. Ulysses offers a full screen mode which fills the screen and removes the menubar, and a console mode which is similar to WriteRoom or Full Screen mode in Scrivener.
There are five screencasts available from the developer which offer a good run through of the featureset of Ulysses. A few of my favorites:
- Text Trash – When deleting text, you can use shift-backspace to tuck anything you delete into the Text Trash where it can be easily retrieve if you decide you need it back.
- Automatic Backups – Ulysses can keep a document history should you decide you want to go back and use an original draft instead of your uninspired revision.
- Semantic Editing – Ulysses is a straight text editor to allow you to focus on writing only. But it offers tagging formats which can be converted to formatted text when the document is exported.
- iPhone Version – It’s indevelopment!
If you are familiar with Scrivener, you will find Ulysses is similar in concept and function. You may or may not like the way that notes are connected to each individual text document. Project wide notes are also available, but cannot be organized as well as in Scrivener. You might miss the ability to edit multiple Scrivenings and the corkboard viewer as a way of organizing thoughts and structure.
If you are familiar with StoryMill, you will find that Ulysses is more diverse as it is designed for writing more than fiction. You might miss the Timeline, but appreciate the added flexibility of sorting notes and characters, plot, and research as unique documents.
Ulysses 2.0 is reviewed here and sells for 45 Euros (approximately $67). Ulysses Core has a reduced featureset and is available for 25 Euros (approximately $37).
TheSoulmen have been kind enough to make a license of Ulysses 2.0 available for a giveaway. There are three ways you can enter:
All entries must be received by 12:01am CST on Monday, November 2. The winner will be contacted that day via email and/or the @creativityist Twitter account.