Taking another look at Ulysses

Posted by Hugh
May 18, 2014 at 05:31 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
Is this some kind of a mass phenomenon of switching to Macs, or have you
>all on this thread always been Mac users? I’m just wondering what the
>main attraction of Macs is these days, especially of users on this
>forum. In the UK there is a pretty big price difference between Windows
>and Mac machines, which has managed to put me off so far even from just
>contemplating such a switch. I’m just wondering if any of you were
>Windows users who have decided to switch to a Mac, and why?

Ha! We simply enjoy having the opportunity to break cover and endorse a good Mac application - just to make all you Windoze users jealous…

In reality, I switched to a Mac about seven years ago specifically in order to use Scrivener. I had previously used Windows, and before it MS-DOS, for nearly twenty years in various corporate environments. I was trying to write a complicated long-form document - all right, a book - trying out numerous Windows applications for the purpose: Liquid Story Binder, WriteWay, WriteItNow, yWriter, PageFour, RoughDraft, New Novelist, IdeaMason and of course MS Word amongst them. All were ‘wrong’ for me, and I finally gave up Windows in disgust and dismay when Word lost 40,000 words. (That isn’t to say that all those applications and others weren’t then ‘good’ and aren’t even better now - or that there aren’t really excellent programmes now in the Windows realm in other areas, Connected Text amongst them. In particular, I think Word is now better at coping with documents of more than 20,000 words than it used to be - or at least the hardware is better.)

Incidentally, investing in a Mac desktop need not be so expensive: Mac Minis are the often-forgotten but relatively cheap, reasonably powerful and very reliable end of the Mac range. And it’s good to have a desktop that can handle 16 GB of RAM but whose physical footprint isn’t much larger than a hard-back novel’s.