That seems like a pretty nicely contained GTD program, or at least a way to replace text files for the less grep-able among us.

I keep trying, and trying, and trying Ulysses, and hoping each time that I’ll discover the thing which makes it a killer app. But I haven’t found it. Despite really, really wanting to, I can’t justify the purchase price.

There’s really one one feature that I desperately wish I could have: full screen mode. I keep the demo on my machine because I’m not aware of any other app for writing text which gives me that option. So I copy-and-paste whatever I’m working on into Ulysses and write until I get nervous, and then copy-and-paste back to somewhere I can save it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And there’s one big, fundamental flaw: styles. I appreciate that the creators of Ulysses want me to focus on the words, but sometimes I just need to make something bold or italic. We’re not talking major formatting here, just some simple visual emphasis, even if it’s just for myself (like a comment which reads, “I know that Charlotte needs to confront Herman, but it’s not flowing right now. Insert confrontational text here.”) Sure, I could use ASCII symbols to do it, but then it’s more invasive and un-intuitive, rather than less.

Does anyone know any other apps which provide a similar full-screen mode, so I can die happy and finally finish my novel?

Jeffrey, I am in exactly the same boat: I can’t afford $75, but I kind of like the Ulysses feature set and I really like full-screen mode. If the app were $30 I’d buy it immediately. It is ridiculously overpriced, considering what you get when you register, say, Mellel for far less.

That is one beautiful “looking” app. Now I wish I had a mac. Do you know of any text editors in the PC world that offer similar features? Looking for simplicity and full screen modes.

(Newcomer to your blog Merlin. LOVE IT.) Having recently demo’d Ulysses myself, I (like Pete) came to the conclusion that the only really must have thing about it, was the fullscreen mode. Thus…in lieu of anything cheaper/proper/better - I have set up a simple TextEdit file - coloured the page background black, chosen favourite font, coloured chosen font a nice terminal green…or nice blood red (depending on mood) - set up margins, font size, line spacing etc - dragged page out to the edges of screen - and VOILA! Looks identical to Ulysses fullscreen (barring menu and TextEdit title bar at the top) - and certainly has EXACTLY the same effect on my writing focus. Works for me anyway - sometimes the simple solutions are best. And fortunately, often the most simple solutions, are….FREE.

I get the feeling Ulysses is inspired by Keynote on the PC. Three panels. RTF-based. Instead of tabbed projects, Keynote uses a tree or outline of documents on the left side. Some nice things Keynote has is a scratch pad, macros, and built-in strong encryption.

I agree with the comments on the price. I live in Euroland myself, so the exchange rate has no bearing here for me but it’s still overpriced compared with other software. (It so happens Keynote is free. Not to say Ulysses should be free; I would gladly pay but not €100.)

I, too, am pretty much astounded by some of Ulysses features, and that full-screen mode is a killer. A novelist friend is planning to buy it (or at least trying to convince himself to shell out $130) just for that.

However, Ulysses is a bit rigid in its implementation, and has some flaws. But the developer has shown his interest in reacting to user comments and adding features very quickly.

Ulysses seems pretty nice, but it’s way too pricey! I think CopyWrite should do the same (though I don’t think it has full-screen mode) and it’s just 30$.

I’m currently writing using TextEdit, but I’d like to have a good app and CopyWrite might be what I’m looking for.

MAJOR warning to anyone who is thinking about trying out the demo: the save feature for projects is disabled, and if you try to create a new project without taking notice of this you will lose everything in your current project. I just lost a bunch of work… Not a good way of impressing a potential customer.

Having played with it for a while it’s certainly an interesting implementation of a strong concept, but the whole just didn’t quite gel for me (though I loved the full screen feature). The asking price is also definitely a bit steep.

I’ve been using CopyWrite for about the last month for NaNoWriMo, and I love it. It’s free for small projects, limited to 5 documents, but other than that it is fully featured. After I wrote five chapters, I went ahead and ponied up ($30 is fair). So far, the app has been great for keeping track of my daily and document word counts, and monitoring my overall 50,000 word goal well with its Statistics pane. I’m excited to try the document versioning out after I finish the novel for the revision process. It also backs up your projects for you into a Zip file, plus exports into RTF. I tried an export, opened the RTF in TextEdit and switched it to Plain Text just fine.

(Another newcomer, great site! I came for the Moleskine hacks, and have been enjoying Quicksilver and Instiki on your recommendations and reader comments!)

The fullscreen mode really got me thinking, too. I’ve been hunting for something that felt like wordstar or WP5.1 for DOS. The closest I’ve found actually works well. This will only work for Windows, but …

1/ set up sshd on your windows box according to the instructions at http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html, and add whatever text editor you like to work with. Sadly, no joe port yet.

2/ install putty: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

3/ create a “local” profile in putty (ssh to 127.0.0.1), and under the “Window” preferences, choose “When windos is resized: Change font size only when maximized.”

4/ start a session, and pick “Fullscreen” from the window menu.

5/ start up the text editor of your choice, and off you go!

Simon, I had the same problem, though I didn’t lose a bunch of work, since I hadn’t really typed anything of significance.

To have a full-featured 30-day demo—including the ability to save projects—just go through the menus as follows:

Ulysses > Register …

And then click the button that says “Test license.”

You’ll need an active Internet connection to make this work.

So far, I’m impressed by the full-screen mode (joining the choir on that one). The rest of the features deserve a little bit more of my time before I pass judgment. This little app has too much specific functionality for me to give it a cursory glance.

Like I said, I agree with most people on price. It’s pretty costly given the competition and the vitality of the Mac free and shareware market.

Sounds like if they could find a way to bring it down to the $30-$50 range they might move a lot of units.

Hi there.

Just a few words on the demo and on pricing: The demo is just that — a demo. We make it obvious in various places, that you cannot save your project or export your work when using the demo. For excessive trying-out, we have included a trial license, available from within the application menu. 30 days, save/export enabled 8in fact, everything is enabled), would’ve even lasted for NaNo as a whole. ;)

Price: There are several things to consider before you’re calling a software “pricey”. It’s not all about a certain feature set or whatnot. Think about it: Support, the direction the app is going, updates, etc. — these are often overlooked, but what good are 20 dollars spent on an application that suddenly moves into a different direction? What good are 20 dollars spent only to discover after 3 weeks that it does not suit you? What good are 20 dollars if the dev-team doesn’t answer your questions? What good are 20 dollars if it’s another 20 dollars 4 months later?

Whatever… Thanx for the thumbs up on the Fullscreen mode. We love it, too, hehe. Oh, and there#s a EDU-license, FWIW.

Nice site, btw, keep it up. :)

That price is a huge entry barrier… Anyone aware of ‘CopyWrite’? I like it very much… I think its around 30US$

http://www.bartastechnologies.com

Fond regards from Spain! TFS

I’m using MS Word XP for Windows right now and it has a full-screen mode [View | Full Screen]. Does Word for the Mac not have a full-screen editing option?

stopgap: Word’s FullScreen mode and Ulysses’s Fullscreen mode are different. Word’s isn’t truly fullscreen—you still see the Apple menu, Dock, any background apps. Ulysses fullscreen mode shows you NOTHING but your words. Imagine your screen turned into a piece of typewriter paper, and you’ll be close (although their default is black screen with mustard-yellow fonts).

I am a full-time writer (I’m the novelist Kirk mentions above), so I assume I might be Ulysses’ target market, and I find much to admire in the program, but the price is still too high. Mr. Fehnman’s hypothetical questions aside, the most compelling attribute to me of Ulysses is the fullscreen mode. I’m used to keeping related documents in folders and using comments for notes, so the project management side of Ulysses doesn’t do much for me, although I do think it is smart and elegant. But it’s not powerful enough to get me to change my workflow. So that leaves you with the unique and brilliant fullscreen mode, and that’s just not worth $130 to me.

There are many other attractively priced programs that are good at specific jobs where they don’t charge for updates, they respond to users, etc, so the good folks at Ulysses are not alone in that regard. I think US $50-75 would be a fair price for Ulysses. As nice as Ulysses is, I don’t need to write my books. On blue-tec’s support forums, there has been a fair amount of discussion as to the price, but no signs of reconsideration from the developers, so I suspect that it’s a non-issue for them. It was mentioned at one point (and I’m not quoting exactly, so forgive me) they wanted a smaller set of customers who would really appreciate the product, as opposed to a large customer base that might try to pull them in many different directions from their vision. I suspect the price is part of that strategy.

Another vote here for Copywrite. All the Cocoa goodness you’d like, full-screen, rudimentary formating, excellent global find and replace, and cheap. Check it out!

The fullscreen mode in Word for Windows does what you describe. One of the few examples of Microsoft’s Windows design teams doing something better than their Mac team, I guess.

I purchased Ulysses. This program really helps you focus on writing. It’s easy to be organized and having everything you need at your disposal is very useful. It is simple and bloat free.

Ulysses has three flaws.

1/ There is no way to maintain footnotes, endnotes or any type of bibliography. All footnote/bibliography management is manual. This is a real handicap if you write non-fiction documents. The developers say Ulysses is for creative writing, and they mean it. There has to be a way to incorporate simple citation management/tracking in the spirit of Ulysses’ bloat-free, keep-it-simple approach. Do the developers expect us to use note-cards as if it were 1970?

2/ There is minimal control of line spacing and spacing between paragraphs. If the limited optiions in Ulysses do not work for you, than you must add blank lines and remove them when it is time to format your work in another program. It’s easy to do, but for the cost it is annoying to go through this all the time.

3/ The user guide is barely adequate. While the on-line forum is a big help, the user guide needs more detail. It would help new users if there was a section that discussed different ways to take advantage of Ulysses’ strengths. I’ve been using computers since 1973 and it took me awhile to figure out all the features I needed by trial and error. If someone had only used Word all their life, I’m guessing they might not see how Ulysses should be used.

I used to write everything in NeoOfficeJ. I jumped between three or four OOo documents (outline, notes, document/version/history, etc.) at once. Ulysses eliminates this. Still, I spent a great deal of time working out procedures for using NeoOfficeJ (OOo) together with Ulysses for academic manuscript production.

Eventually, Ulysses improved my efficiency as a writer. It’s too bad they will not expand this program to meet the needs of non-fiction document production.

Willie,

For non-fiction citation management, nothing beats Endnote. Yes, it’s a one-trick pony, and yes, the support for Word 2004 is, um, virtually non-existant, but it’s the absolute best way to manage references, bar none. I use it both for creative and non-fiction writing for keeping track of my research.

Of course, it’s integration with Ulysses is less than non-existant. Which is, sadly, another strike against Ulysses.

On another note: in a desperate attempt to get true full-screen mode on my iBook, I considered using emacs while logged in at a text console. Strangely, when I tried the old trick of “>console” as a login name, it didn’t work. Is it me, a new “feature” of 10.3 or a “feature” of my iBook G4? Anyone know?

I wanna see what everyone is raving about but I tried to use Ulysses and couldn’t. I am using it on an iMac and it keeps telling me “The application Ulysses has unexpectedly quit.” Anybody has any idea why this is happening?

Jeffery,

I too use EndNote. For journal articles I use Ulysses with it’s three-level tags to organize my thoughts and initial research notes. Then I export the three-level version from Ulysses to NeoOfficeJ and write a manically detailed outline. This outline contains all citations and equations. The citations are organaized with EndNote. I save PDFs of the cited articles in a separate OS X folder and use EndNote’s link feature to read them in the middle of “battle”. I’d bet my Powerbook Ulysses will never interface with EndNote or anything else even though Bibtex seems like a no-brainer to me for Ulysses.

I do use Ulysses documents exclusively for fiction writing though. All my fiction research is organized with Ulysses using their lables system. Would you share how you use EndNote for fiction writing?

Willie

I do a good deal of research for my fiction, and the uses for Endnote are pretty straightforward. For example, when working on a historical novel I had a library of roughly 45 items, everything from maps to journals to photos in historical archives to scholarly articles and a couple of books.

In this case, it was simply the easiest way to maintain my notes and keep them in an organized way. Technically, it was all “prewriting” rather than writing, but, for me (and I presume that most writers are the same) it is an evolving, organic process, which revolves around itself and only gradually resolves on a coherent story.

I suppose I should mention that I do typically start with fictional characters set in a real historical past. If I were writing fantasy or sci-fi or YA romance, or contemporary suburban realism for that matter, I probably wouldn’t need to do as much research, and Endnote would be irrelevant. Then again, my wife would argue that most of my research is simply procrastination with another name…

I too took Ulysses for a spin but didn’t find it doing any magic that I couldn’t do in Emacs — except the fullscreen feature — but I can drag a screen session wider and block out the background, right?

…and it can export to LaTeX — hm, that’s pretty cool (i guess) ….. but I don’t really see what’s so magic about it either….

Maybe U needs an X in this analogy:

Merlin Mann: QuickSilver :: ?????? : Ulysses

I purchased Ulysses over a year ago, and couldn’t imagine not having it in my app folder. Christ, money is meant to be spent, and I’ll spend it again, and again to keep hold of this bugger.

Apparently, MacJournal v.2.7 (upincoming) will have a fullscreen mode.

At first I read everybody’s kind comments and thought “maybe it is worth it, writers earn it back if it encourages productivity”, after all it’s a good forward thinking Mac app and €100 ($200 AUD) is a lot, but not that much in the grand scheme of things… but then I got to thinking what if everybody did it.. surely if Ulysses can charge a price like that out of “moral courage” the other developers deserve it too. Superb forward-thinking Mac applications like: SubEthaEdit, Delicious Library, NetNewsWire, MacJournal, Desktop Manager, NewsFire, Quicksilver, Butler, TextMate, Watson, Konfabulator - none of them charge(d) more than $50US for their software, all sterling applications. Perhaps they deserve more in general… But if a text-only application like Ulysses can get away with charging €100 for their application we are only encouraging those specific developers, not all the other great developers in general. Maybe these guys are just more honest about the real costs of developing good Mac software. I also realised 2 things: -It’s asking for another developer to undercut them at a more reasonable price (Even €50 seems like a premium price). -Although in some way I feel it could be worth it (because of the essential value of every creation), I just can’t justify buying it because I would be trashing the effort of all the other great developers asking so much less.

I tried Ulysses, but quite frankly, quickly went back to Alepin, which cost me a mere $15 Cnd and does almost the same thing, without the clutter.

Copywrite is another you might want to look into.

Personally, I find Textedit to be a good enough editor for me. What I do is set the font to a nice fixed width font, Courier 13, and set the default format to text. I also turn off the ruler and automatic spell checking.

Works for me.