Ulysses – An App, but can it be of any use?

As a follower and Patreon of 58Keys and William Gallagher, I quite often get recommendations of Apps that would be useful to writers. This week was no exception.

Ulysses is a writing app I have come across before because it is one of the apps available through the subscription service Setapp. On a previous occasion, I downloaded it. I tried it and didn’t get on with it. William announced on his latest podcast that Ulysses has had an update. These concern the implementation of Apple Intelligence and the Action Button on the latest iPhones. I’m not using Ulysses on the iPhone. I’m not sure that it will work on my Series 3 SE. I have the Drafts App on my phone and MacBook, but that can be for another blog.

How does Ulysses work?

Ulysses allows the writer to get the words written and forget about formatting until later. The formatting is made simpler by using the Markdown XL , one of the shortcuts has emphasised the previous words and inserted the subheading into this paragraph. There are twenty-five shortcuts, including inserting images and videos into the piece.

The clever thing about this app is that it will publish to this WordPress Blog. Well, the only way I can prove that is that you are reading this on the blog. I’m not sure if that is right. If it is published correctly, I will mention it in my social media posts to promote this.

Ulysses saves all files in one place, rather like Day One if you are familiar with that Journalling App. It also saves them to a cloud server. Keywords can filter files, and you can create projects and search within them.

I must say, that I’m highly impressed by what I have seen and what I’ve used so far. Being able to concentrate in writing the words and formatting later is helpful for me as a writer. If I can then get it to publish to my blog, it would be extremely useful for me. I have read that people have been using it to write novels. At the moment I’m happy writing my novels in Scrivener and I wouldn’t look to changing that just yet. Scrivener has so much more to it than just being a word processor.

Would I recommend this app?

I think that I would. I shall definitely be using it for a while longer yet. I have already found using the shortcuts easy, which is unusual for as I am notorious for not using shortcuts.

I suppose now is the time to see how easy this is to publish to my website. Wish me luck.