Big update makes writer’s app Ulysses III even more useful

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Straight outta Leipzig comes the latest update to Soulmen’s Ulysses III, the writers’ text editor for the Mac. As ever with Soulmen updates, the fact that this is a “mere” point update shouldn’t fool you. Ulysses III 1.2 is the kind of thing many folks would ship as a v2.0.

The full release notes, available in the app as a text file (of course) brings roughly a zillion new features and fixes. I’ll just list a few of my favorites.

You can now split and merge sheets. This is great if you decide that that scene in your novel should really be two scenes, or vice versa. Now you can fix that without a whole lot of copying and pasting


Goals. You can attach a word target to any sheet (documents are called sheets in Ulysses). It can also be a character count, a sentence count, a page count and more, and you can set the target to a rough number or “at least” and “at most.” Once set (through the Edit>Attach menu), a new icon appears at the top right of your sheet. Clicking it shows progress in a neat circular graph, and you can edit the parameters from there.

Also, goals, along with keywords and creation dates, can be shown in the sheet previews, i.e. the little summaries in the list of documents in the current project.

Also shown in theses previews are keywords, or tags, if you decide to turn them on. Ulysses is designed to work with iCloud, and that’s where you need to keep your files if you want to use all the editor’s features. But now, if you prefer to keep some files in “external sources” (you Mac, or your Dropbox), then any keywords will be added as Mavericks Finder tags.

There’s a whole lot more, including the launch of a new Style Exchange site so you can share — you guessed it — app styles with other folks, and browse for new ones yourself.

I’ve been using Scrivener a lot recently to write fiction (note — good beta readers needed), and I love it. But I much prefer the clean design of Ulysses. With this update, and its many tweaks and additions, the app is now a viable alternative to Scrivener. It’s not nearly as full-featured as its rival, but that makes it a lot easier to use, and what is there is beautifully designed.

The update is free for existing users and $45 for noobs.

Source: Mac App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/app/ulysses-iii/id623795237?ls=1&mt=12&uo=4&partnerId=30)

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