Ulysses for iPad shaping up nicely...

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 6, 2015 at 09:34 AM

Interestingly, I’ve only been able to find four Markdown/rich-text outliners that also support tags and are cross-platform (MacOS and iOS), and none of them are outliners in the fullest sense of the term. They are:

Ulysses III (and its upcoming iPad sibling)
Letterspace (already runs on iOS: iPad and iPhone. Sync is a bit iffy, maybe because it uses iCloud, but new versions are in the offing)
Notebooks (the most mature: supports tags [as contexts] as well as Markdown and rich text! Slightly clunky on sync [Dropbox])
Keep Everything (runs on iPad and iPhone, doesn’t have the most sophisticated editor, but syncs pretty well [again, Dropbox], although you have to double-sync to preserve categories)

And who knows what Scrivener for iOS will be like? The signs are promising, but I don’t expect to see an actual app before 2020…

OmniOutliner is very powerful, but doesn’t support tags as such, although I suppose it could be set up as if it did. It uses its own synchronisation server. It’s also a bit of a heavyweight and doesn’t run on iPhone. The latter weakness is/will be true of Ulysses for iPad, too.

I’m looking forward to the iOS version of OutlineEdit, because I think that would be amazingly cool (outliner + tags/categories + rich text). Robin…?

I no longer make much distinction between rich text and Markdown. The latter has the advantage of being, fundamentally, text-only. But rich text is undoubtedly easier and more elegant to use. One of my favourite rich-text editors (which also supports Markdown), Quiver, is, alas, unlikely to make it to iOS in anything other than ‘viewer’ form. That will be good, but not great.

There’s a big niche waiting to be filled here, for which OutlineEdit might well be the ideal app: an outliner that is cross-platform, supports rich text and supports tags. Workflowy doesn’t fit the bill, unfortunately - I’ve tried.