I have been using Ulysses now for seven years as the primary tool for preparing scholarly articles, conference papers, books, and research notes. It is so far superior to any other writing and research organization app that there's no comparison. The familiar features – the zen-like writing mode, the progress bar – have markedly improved how I work. And since all my writing lives in one easy-to-organize space, when I have to prepare a new talk or magazine article based on research I've done years ago (a frequent task for academics), it's very easy to call up everything I've written before on the topic. And for those who have never used a progress tracker for writing, it is hard to express how motivating it is to see Ulysses' circles fill up and then turn green as you write away. One less obvious benefit of this is for presentations with a hard time limit; once you know how many words you typically speak per minute, it becomes very easy to gauge how long the entire text should be. Ulysses also allows you to set word counts for each individual section. Since using this app, my conference papers have not only never gone over time, but the proportions are always very easy to manage.So much for classic Ulysses. Version 19 gave us a feature I didn't realize how much I needed until it was there: Projects. At the moment I'm working on several books and book-length manuscripts. This new feature makes it easier, more streamlined, and even more motivating to organize large, multi-section texts. I take every chance I get to recommend this app to anyone I know who writes for a living.

I use Ulysses for writing ficiton. I was a Scrivener user for years. It's a powerful program that reminds me in some ways of Photoshop - incredibly powerful yet complex in ways I often never get around to using. The #1 reason I choose to write in Ulysses is the ability to sync and access my Ulysses projects from all my Mac devices - iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro. This is where Scrivener falls apart - their iPad app is a different program, and syncing across multiple devices requires third party programs and platforms ... and then it still doesn't work that great. I can write anywhere, anytime. My other favorite feature is being able to write in Markdown -- so with two keyboard clicks, I can leave inline notes to myself within the text that do not export to the finished document and don't exist in a sidebar. The simplicity of the design in relationship to the variety of function is great. Two feature requests - I still use Pacemaker for project wordcount setting and goal keeping. I'd love it if Ulysses' in app goal setting features were so robust. I also wish the color coding on keywords was more saturated/ high contrast, and that colors could be assigned to elements in the Library.

Finally, a program where I can keep my academic writing drafts and reading notes in a single uncluttered, easy-to-use environment. I love the simple markdown commands, which keep me writing without constantly having to stop to mouse over to a toolbar or open a menu window. I encountered only one problem in my initial use of the program, which was that my block quotes kept appearing center-justified and in italics after export (this is not a typical format in publications in my humanities discipline). When I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the quotes to come out in normal font style and left-justified, I wrote to customer support for help. Within 24 hours I received clear instructions for solving the problem by changing the style sheet, and now I know how to change other formatting issues in the style sheet should they arise. ***UPDATE: I've been using the app now for a couple of years and although I'm not making any particularly high-tech use of it (I don't blog or otherwise publish online using my own markup), but it continues to serve my academic needs extremely well. It's a keeper!

Apps with non-standard UIs and I just don't tend to get along. I use most apps in fits and starts, and that's certainly true of Ulysses. If I wrote for a living, or maybe even if I journaled every day, it'd be different - I'd be using the app pretty much daily and wouldn't have a chance to forget all its peculiarities. But I don't write every day; I write when I feel inspired to, and that might be every day for three days in a row or for a week, and then I won't feel the need to write again for a month, and therein lies the problem with apps with non-standard UIs: when I launch an app with a non-standard UI after that month of not using it, I've completely forgotten how it works and I need to go through a tutorial all over again if I want to use it. Which is not something I'm willing to do for any app that's not essential to my life. And for me personally, the value of a pretty UI and having no visual distractions while writing is nowhere near so great that I would think it worth my while to re-school myself on how to use Ulysses all over again every time I forget.

The whole idea behind the Mac is that computing should be intuitive, and Ulysses is not. So I'm most likely done with it and will be going back to Word or some other app that I know how to operate when I open it, no matter how long it's been since I last used it.

As a novelist and short story writer, I'm enjoying using Ulysses on both my Mac and my iPad. It's biggest strength against any competitors is the seamless iCloud syncing. Other apps are too finicky or have very limited syncing options. With Ulyssees, the writing I do on my Mac just appears on my iPad and vice-versa. I can write and edit virtually anywhere. The otheer feature I think is a strength is that all of your writing is in one container, which you can organize however you want. I like this over having separate files for each project and wondering where that story you worked on three years ago is on your disk. Features that would get it a fifth star would be better planning tools (like a spreadsheet view that showed part of the first line of a sheet, or the first comment, keywords for each sheet, the target word count, and the current word count, with rows that can be rearranged by dragging), an ability to add meta data to a group and include it in the export (for example, author name, word count, story title, and the like for a manuscript suitable for submission to a publisher), and more formatting options in the export styles.

[UPDATE 2021: It's been on-again, off-again for me & Ulysses over the last few years. Just installed it again for the first time in a while, and it looks really good now. Many of the features that have been added seem to have been taken right from a wish list I wasn't even aware I had in my mind. It's rewarding to play with this app again! I think it will probably remain in the ol' Dock for a while this time.Ulysses is such a polished, thoughtful, consistent, well-supported app that’s truly a joy to work in, it’s totally worth the subscription price. I can’t even remember when I paid for this app in the first place, but it’s been years, and since then I’ve gotten tons of hours of wonderfully productive use out of it, and I’ve had multiple email conversations with the developers, who seem to actually care about the feedback and comments I’ve offered. Some of the exact, specific changes I’ve suggested have been, actually rather swiftly, implemented—I’m not saying it was just because of me, but still! For an existing owner of the app, the new pricing model comes out to less than $3 a month. A MONTH. I can handle it. I’m glad to handle it. I know the concerns about subscriptions—EVERYONE wants a little piece of you each month now. I get it. But some products and services are worth paying for, and… maybe some aren’t. Maybe the growing predominance of the subscription model means we just need to be a little more selective? I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Anyway, Ulysses is top of my list. Aesthetics, spotlight integration, balance of simplicity and features, great support as I already mentioned, iCloud syncing that never fails, awesome iOS version (included with the subscription—as many devices as you need, come on!!)… Like I said, it’s unambiguously worth it.

I have just moved over to the Mac ecosystem from windows/google, and I was using another program almost exclusively. Heard Wonderfull things about Ulysses and had to give it a try. First off, I’m not a hug fan of subscription models, I would rather just pay outright, but this is worth it. I love the fact that the editor just gets out of my way, almost as if I have a blank page in front of me. Over the years, I found I work best when I can get my idea out first, then edit second. Ulysses makes it easy to plan as much or as little as I want. Outline, character sheets, plot mapping all can be done inside the box. Markdown is simple enough and to be honest, I like to keep everything as a txt file, yes you loose formatting, but it can still be opened twenty years later. What really won me over is the fact that bouncing between devices is painless. I don’t have to worry that what I wrote on my phone at lunch will not open or format right on my laptop when I get home. This is what sold me, I can start an idea anywhere and fully flesh it out later without loosing a beat.

Here's a splendid tool that every writer should have, a versatile engine that is devoted to nothing less than prose itself, and while it can do much more, its entire point is as simple as that, becasue as the old saying goes, writers write -- and it's really the only pedigreee any writer needs, because if you're writing, you're a writer, and if you're not, you aren't. Ulysses takes its name from what happens to be my favorite poem, an heroic epic from no less than Tennyson almighty, who like all writers knew the agony of an art that begins with nothing, but by som curious alchemy offers outcomes our world simply could not be without. We writers are as Tennyson penned, "one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." Quite simply -- in a way that is both simple but not easy, Ulysses (both the app and the epic poem) helps us get there. So download it, then spring for the modest annual, and then get to work and use it every day, because whether you know it or not, the world needs your pen, your poetry, and your prose, and we need them all more than ever before. Five stars, but only becasuse it wont let me give any more.

I hardly write reviews but I love this app so much that I feel that it would be heloful to point out this flaw. The autocorrect, grammar and spellcheck, and dictionary of this software lag FAR behind the brillaince of the rest of the package. The program doesn’t know many common words, autocorrects to a dangerous degree, and, most annoyingly of all, when a word is marked as misspelled, it is very cumbersome to right-click in order to change it from the available menu of corrections as one would do in word. Right-clicking on a word that has been flagged will often jsut bring up the same menu as woul dcome up if you right-click anywhere else. At least fix this. When a word is flagged I should be able to right-click it to select a correciton with maximum ease. Other than that, thank you for this product. It really is an excellent way to compose and to take notes and it fits effortlessly when integrated iwth other apps, esepcially using split view on Mac where you can make the window small and take notes from another, larger, part of the screen.

I've been using Ulysses for years since I started writing a novel & needed a better system for organization and editing. The recent updates with Projects feature have been great so far; before then I had to buy another app (Scrivener) for more complex stuff but then I kept coming back to this one because the UI and syncing in Ulysses are truly unbeatable. I not only write from my mac but also my phone and iPad, and have to admit that it really has the best UI for focus and simple editing. One thing I hope from the app is that there are less options for importing outside sources, like attaching PDF files or images. I know the editor isn't exactly to support high resolution files or complex layout before editing, but as the one who does not publish my writing through HTML or PDF and use Markup features only for faster writing & organization I sometimes want a system that can put together what I've researched for writing. I understand that simplicity is the key in Ulysses but it'd be great if you could allow something similar to happen in this wonderful app!

i find this app to hold everthing I write and keep it where ever i save it within the app itself, with the other app I tried prior to this one, i would write 5 chapters save write another 5 chapters then save with the other 5 chapters, then save go back to write more and find 3 chapters up to the entire 10 written to be gone, no where to be found, disappeared without a trace, this happened with multible different apps and i just deleted all of them and seen this on read its reveiws and said why not? and tried one more time with it, and allthough i have not figured out the bulk of this app and how to use it properly as yet, I currently have 4 different books started over the last almost 3 years and it has not crashed once and still has every single letter i have typed exactly where i typed it at. my ability to utilize this app is exactly that, " My inability" not this apps. I will eventaully either figure out what i have to and finish a project within this app or i will find someone who can and ask them to do it

Editing my previous review (bumping it up to four stars from three)...A couple of weeks ago, I slammed Ulysses for recent iCloud sync issues. Then I did some more research and learned it’s not alone in that regard. Indeed, many if not most so-called “shoebox” or central-library apps — like, to name two very familiar examples, Apple’s own Notes and Photos apps — are prone to them, too. It seems to be the nature of the beast. If you value having all your work together in the same library at all times without having to futz around with individual files and folders, the risks that go with the “shoebox” method are part of the price of admission. So I withdraw that previous complaint.Indeed, if it were not for that method of file storage and the occasional (but sometimes scary) glitches that accompany it, I’d give Ulysses five stars. For most of my work, I prefer the advantages of MultiMarkdown and a more transparent file structure than what Ulysses offers. That said, I still recommend it highly; it’s a great app and a marvelous writing environment in which you’ll spend many hours working happily and productively.