Ulysses Gets Redesigned Dashboard With Style and Grammar Checker

[drumcat]

There were many people that paid the one-time price for Ulysses, and they decided to move to a rental and stuff their current users.

It is unethical to call it anything but a rental.

 

[jchap]

If you do not like subscriptions, do not pay for them and find something else.
If you do not like subscriptions, a price or a product, just do not waste your time and energy ranting about it.
I say the only reason to complain is when you pay for a service and are unsatisfied with the quality or features of that application.

These are fair points. A lot of people do waste time and energy complaining.

I think the reason why so many people are complaining here is not really about the quality of the app, but about the pricing scheme. Since so many software developers have shifted to a subscription model, and there are already a wealth of competing products on the market (some of which are free), it’s fair to ask whether the software now deserves its status as a “rental” product, that’s dependent upon whether you keep paying into it year after year.

I would suggest that those who complain about subscriptions in general should first take their case to the developers... forums are good places for developing arguments, but lousy places for making a change.

 

[macjunk(ie)]

One app that's really doing this right is Agenda, which is truly a subscription (not a rental). You pay for a year's worth of new premium features, and then when the year is up those features are yours to keep even if you stop paying.

Not sure if any other developers are using this model, but I think it strikes a balance with ongoing income and fairness to the user.

Jetbrains suite of products that I subscribe to also offer the same model. Plus, with every passing year until the third year, they reduce the price of the subscription. Much better than the sub model of other companies

With Ulysses, I initially liked the product a lot. And then I realized that these guys are really slow at rolling out features. It is as if, they are not accountable to anybody.

For e.g., a percentage of users have been asking for table support since 2014 (2013?) and their answer since then has been that we are working on it...we want to release the most perfect version ever..blah blah. Other products like Typora meanwhile are launching with these features. Meanwhile Ulysses seems to be working on their own schedule, on features they are interested in - at least this is the impression I have of Ulysses after being with them since 2015.

For e.g., their improved dashboard was not really a must-have but rather a nice-to-have. To their credit though, IMO, they are by far the best looking app in this space. Their iOS apps are mostly full fledged versions of the desktop app. This is a good app for non-scientific writers - no doubt about that. Tech and scientific writers are better served by other apps such as Emacs.

On that note, shout out to Emacs (I am using the Doom configuration). There is a learning curve but boy what a tool! This is an OS for text, not a text editor. Every other editor seems paltry by comparison. You want tables? Here you go! Oh...you want to sort your tables? Sure...go for it. You want to execute your program that is embedded with your text. Easy! It has features that I did not even know I needed until I started using it.

I wish I had invested 5 years into Emacs rather than into Ulysses. It is open source and free. Holds data in text format and not in a proprietary package that Ulysses uses.

The most painful thing right now is transferring all my content over the last 5 years (and that includes a mater's degree) over to Emacs.

 

[MuppetGate]

Jetbrains suite of products that I subscribe to also offer the same model. Plus, with every passing year until the third year, they reduce the price of the subscription. Much better than the sub model of other companies

Yep. After a rocky start, Jetbrains showed how subscriptions should work. I signed up on day one and have been renewing ever since. They are constantly updating their suite with genuinely useful functions and UI changes that are more than just moving stuff about. And they've used the income stability to invest in new products (such as the Kotlin language, which I'm sure provided some of the inspiration for Swift) and services. Huge rewrites are under way so that plugins don't require a restart, and global indexing of common packages to speed up the start up times. Jetbrains and Agenda are what a subscription service should look like.

With Ulysses, I initially liked the product a lot. And then I realized that these guys are really slow at rolling out features. It is as if, they are not accountable to anybody.

Subscriptions happen for one of two reasons:

1. The company genuinely wants to have a guaranteed income stream to build out their product line (Jetbrains, Agenda)
2. The company genuinely wants to have a guaranteed income from a product that is finished and in maintenance mode (Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite)

(I'm probably being unfair on Office since they do thrown in a lot of free cloudy stuff)

It can be hard to tell which is which until you're about two years into your subscription payments, but a good way to tell is see what happens when the subscription is announced. In hindsight, I've realised that closing down support forums and going to an email/twitter service is a bad sign.

Since Ulysses went sub, the changes have been cosmetic, or have been enhancements where the bulk of the work has been carried by improvements made by Apple to its frameworks. I can't think of anything that has been done to improves support for markdown, or enhance the export.

For e.g., a percentage of users have been asking for table support since 2014 (2013?) and their answer since then has been that we are working on it...we want to release the most perfect version ever..blah blah. Other products like Typora meanwhile are launching with these features. Meanwhile Ulysses seems to be working on their own schedule, on features they are interested in - at least this is the impression I have of Ulysses after being with them since 2015

Ah, the tables. Vital if you want to use it for academic work I would have thought. I think the schedule has been taken over by marketing: new website, new people to deal with the social media side of things, lots of interviews with authors …

I wish I had invested 5 years into Emacs rather than into Ulysses.

I think the lesson I've learned from this is that I shouldn't buy based on a promise. Hope the lesson sticks this time

 

[johnnytravels]

I think the lesson I've learned from this is that I shouldn't buy based on a promise. Hope the lesson sticks this time

About sums it up

 

[jchap]

Ah, the tables. Vital if you want to use it for academic work I would have thought. I think the schedule has been taken over by marketing: new website, new people to deal with the social media side of things, lots of interviews with authors …

Honestly, I always felt it was asking a bit too much of a text editor (or rather, plain text as a format in general) to support tables. Plain text is not a format that is really amenable to tables as I see it, at least not good-looking tables.

Of course, whether a table looks good or not depends on how the viewer or text editor renders it. Markdown tables are a bit of a mess when you look at them as plain text. It seems better to go with a tool that actually offers proper support of tables (meaning control over things like cell alignment, column and row width, cell colors, border thickness and style and so on), rather than to try rendering plain text or Markdown and hope it looks good.

It's probably that dilemma that's holding the devs at Ulysses back from giving us any kind of table support. I can respect that they don't want to make something that looks and feels like crap. iA Writer does it (although it's pretty clumsy and doesn't look too good). Bear doesn't seem to do it, or at least the commands aren't there yet. Like I said, it might be asking too much of the format (Markdown/text) to produce nice-looking tables. HTML/CSS or else a dedicated word processor is better for that.

 

[jchap]

Since Ulysses went sub, the changes have been cosmetic, or have been enhancements where the bulk of the work has been carried by improvements made by Apple to its frameworks. I can't think of anything that has been done to improves support for markdown, or enhance the export.

Yeah, I wish they would have given this more attention as well over the years. They did introduce fenced code blocks with selectable script languages, which are pretty useful if you like snipping and storing bits of code. They've also done a lot to enhance support for images over the years, although of course the support could be stronger. Ultimately, we're still working with plain text files branded as Markdown, so anyone making a Markdown-based editor has to eventually face those limitations.

 

[MuppetGate]

Honestly, I always felt it was asking a bit too much of a text editor (or rather, plain text as a format in general) to support tables. Plain text is not a format that is really amenable to tables as I see it, at least not good-looking tables.

Of course, whether a table looks good or not depends on how the viewer or text editor renders it. Markdown tables are a bit of a mess when you look at them as plain text. It seems better to go with a tool that actually offers proper support of tables (meaning control over things like cell alignment, column and row width, cell colors, border thickness and style and so on), rather than to try rendering plain text or Markdown and hope it looks good.

It's probably that dilemma that's holding the devs at Ulysses back from giving us any kind of table support. I can respect that they don't want to make something that looks and feels like crap. iA Writer does it (although it's pretty clumsy and doesn't look too good). Bear doesn't seem to do it, or at least the commands aren't there yet. Like I said, it might be asking too much of the format (Markdown/text) to produce nice-looking tables. HTML/CSS or else a dedicated word processor is better for that.

Well, I can see what you're saying, but Ulysses (like IAWriter and Typora) is not exactly dealing with straight plain text; It's designed to handle multi markdown. Yes, you don't have good looking tables in MMD editors (though I understand that IAWriter can format them now), but you also don't have nice-looking footnotes either. They're not supposed to look nice or WYSIWYG; they're supposed to provide a portable system of semantic tags. The point isn't to have good-text in the editor; the point is to get nice-looking text when you run export it, or run it through PanDoc or whatever.

They've been planning this since 2014. If they can't do it six years then I'm not sure they can do it all.

And on top of that, Ulysses doesn't support customisable headers and can't generate incrementing chapter/paragraphs numbers.

All we're seeing is cosmetic tweaks.

Yeah, I wish they would have given this more attention as well over the years. They did introduce fenced code blocks with selectable script languages, which are pretty useful if you like snipping and storing bits of code. They've also done a lot to enhance support for images over the years, although of course the support could be stronger. Ultimately, we're still working with plain text files branded as Markdown, so anyone making a Markdown-based editor has to eventually face those limitations.

The thing is, no one is asking for something that Markdown doesn't already support. Ulysses supports a subset, other editors support the full set and some extensions of their own.

 

[macintoshmac]

These guys really care about helping you write better:

The Power of Style Check

Style Check is like having a personal editor-in-chief on your device, carefully reviewing your text for redundancies, clichés and filler words as you type. It's simple, different, powerful, and available for Mac, iOS, Windows and Android.

ia.net

 

[johnnytravels]

Unfortunately ‘these guys’ only have abysmal footnote support. If they came out with footnotes on par with Scrivener or the latest Ulysses (inline plus overview in side pane) on Mac and at least iPad, I would buy their apps without thinking twice.