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Ulysses App Now Lets Writers Organize Their Work into Projects

Webcat86 said:
I'm not a subscription fan either but if you write a lot and it makes your life easier, I can't imagine griping over 40 bucks a YEAR.

I write a lot. I wrote thousands of words yesterday and I wrote thousands of words today. I write for work as well as side projects. Until this week I've used Pages and Google Docs, both of which have their pros and cons.

But Ulysses offers full markdown support, lots of very useful options that don't exist in Pages or GD, can upload directly to sites like Medium (which I write to, and get paid more per month than Ulysses costs per year), and keep various projects grouped together with their notes and research.

By all means, don't get it if it doesn't fit your needs. But if it does fit your needs and you're complaining about something that costs as much as a single cup of coffee each month to make your life a bit easier on a device that cost 4 figures, you need to look in the mirror.
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That's fine, I write the same, and for me Scrivener does the job flawlessly without the need for a subscription at all. So, again, I don't disagree (and wouldn't quibble about that price), but I also write thousands of words and can do it all with a professional program--Scrivener.
 
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eltoslightfoot said:
That's fine, I write the same, and for me Scrivener does the job flawlessly without the need for a subscription at all. So, again, I don't disagree (and wouldn't quibble about that price), but I also write thousands of words and can do it all with a professional program--Scrivener.
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Then my comment wasn’t for you.

I tried Scrivener years ago and hated it. On paper it was absolutely perfect for me, I was ghostwriting books at the time. I don’t know if it’s improved since then but it just confused me too much - too many features, too many instructions, and it became unpleasant to use.

That’s the big advantage of Ulysses in comparison - there’s a simplicity to it that Scrivener didn’t have when I used it.

But like I said - they’re tools, if you don’t use one because it doesn’t fit your needs then that’s completely different to it being a genuine net positive to your work but a cheap price turning you away.

Subscription models make sense for developers, it’s cashflow. And Apple is encouraging that model too. I share the frustration but it’s hard to blame them.
 
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Webcat86 said:
Then my comment wasn’t for you.

I tried Scrivener years ago and hated it. On paper it was absolutely perfect for me, I was ghostwriting books at the time. I don’t know if it’s improved since then but it just confused me too much - too many features, too many instructions, and it became unpleasant to use.

That’s the big advantage of Ulysses in comparison - there’s a simplicity to it that Scrivener didn’t have when I used it.

But like I said - they’re tools, if you don’t use one because it doesn’t fit your needs then that’s completely different to it being a genuine net positive to your work but a cheap price turning you away.

Subscription models make sense for developers, it’s cashflow. And Apple is encouraging that model too. I share the frustration but it’s hard to blame them.
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Out of curiosity, how does your publishing process work? I mean, that part of Scrivener does suck, but I just use Vellum…
 
eltoslightfoot said:
Out of curiosity, how does your publishing process work? I mean, that part of Scrivener does suck, but I just use Vellum…
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If you mean print publishing I no longer do that so it’s not a concern for me. For digital publishing I’m almost exclusively on Wordpress and medium so either copy/paste or export directly
 
blankmancan said:
Ah. I see. But what about the "scraping of text and images" part. Do the T&Cs literally say "scraping"?
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Anything you upload will be indexed and the metadata packaged for advertisers. It's not different from the way Google was putting ads inside gmail dot com. You could test it out to see what's going on. For example, upload lots of images of shoes or toys to your cloud service and check a couple of days later to see if you are being served shoe and toy ads.
 
If Scrivener had Markdown as a native format, Ulysses would probably lose a lot of customers.

If Ulysses had a corkboard, Scrivener would probably lose a lot of customers.

Both “ifs” being false, choice is harder than it should be. I even know a few authors who write in either of them and then finalize their work in Papyrus, because of the superior German language checker; but that’s another story.
 
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it wasnt me said:
If Scrivener had Markdown as a native format, Ulysses would probably lose a lot of customers.

If Ulysses had a corkboard, Scrivener would probably lose a lot of customers.

Both “ifs” being false, choice is harder than it should be. I even know a few authors who write in either of them and then finalize their work in Papyrus, because of the superior German language checker; but that’s another story.
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This is somewhat true for me. Although, I would say that Ulysses seems to make things more complicated in terms of folders, etc., than it needs to be.

The real issue is no Windows for Ulysses, so that ended that idea. Plus the subscription, so....
 
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