Outlinely gets a (minor) update

Posted by satis
Jun 22, 2018 at 03:05 AM

Smithers wrote:

>
>I just don’t like having the editor and final product look
>different.

I get it.

I love the customizability of Ulysses - I’ve spent far too much time tinkering with the look to be honest - and I don’t mind the incomplete WYSIWYG experience (I’ve spent decades in BBEdit before this), but there are enough niggles for me to be less than fully satisfied. One major disgruntlement: there are times when I want to attach a note to a paragraph but the notes implementation is for an entire sheet, so I end up filling my documents with non-printing inline comments that have uniquely coded ‘tags’ for easier search. It’s a messy-looking kludge, and I’d rather be able to have notes attachable to words, paragraphs or even attachments. And the whole Styles export is terrible (and I’m glad I don’t need to use it), with no obvious info on what a style offers (eg font/size/formatting) other than trying it (and remembering later), no way to customize it, and no easy way to create your own styles. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know what’s being prioritized in terms of features and fixes (I love that Dynalist has a Trello board showing you and letting you vote).

So, I’m mostly satisfied but still not really settled in with the app. If I needed to I could switch to another app I own, be it IA Writer, BBEdit, or Nisus Writer Pro, or even Pages. But Ulysses gets so much right that I don’t mind, for now at least, living inside it for most of my writing.

I feel that unsatisfied with every single writing app I use, each for different reasons. I use Day One multiple times a day, on both Mac and iOS, but I hate not being able to use my own fonts (and tint my background), and hate that nice iOS features like ‘On This Day’ aren’t in the Mac app, and the primitive, insufficient search is irritating. I enjoy IA Writer considerably, but not the restricted font/size/background choices or the inability to move folders in the Document Library. Scrivener is powerful and flexible but incredibly opaque and labyrinthine (just look at the books and sites and video training courses for it) and it’s the type of app I tend to come to hate because if you get away from it for a few weeks you come back and have to relearn odd, specific procedures and tricks. (One reason I don’t use a text expander.)