Ah, my fears have been assuaged. Ulysses for iPad will indeed preserve the one/two/three-pane support it has as a desktop app. Excellent!

More at: http://ulyssesapp.com/blog/2015/02/navigate-with-ease/

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.

For me, cross-platform is iOS and Windows, making things even more complicated. And am I correct in believing that none of the ones you mention are actually outliners? That is, they don't really offer expanding and collapsing text.

For me, Workflowy has actually worked pretty well. The iOS version is a little crippled (especially for export), but works far better than, for instance, Fargo or Oakoutliner on the iPad, which don't seem to detect the arrow keys of my Logitech keyboard, making them both all but unusable.

Another announcement today was Ulysses 2 for OS X. The product that today is Ulysses III v1.2 will become Ulysses 2.0 and drop the "III". It "embraces" the Yosemite design concepts. (Ugh.) Ulysses 2 will be needed for compatibility with Ulysses iOS (iPad and iPhone). No mention of whether v2.0 requires repurchasing Ulysses for OS X.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Ah, my fears have been assuaged. Ulysses for iPad will indeed preserve
the one/two/three-pane support it has as a desktop app. Excellent!

More at: http://ulyssesapp.com/blog/2015/02/navigate-with-ease/

Ulysses 2.0 will be a free update:
http://ulyssesapp.com/blog/2015/02/ulysses-for-mac-2-0/

For me that's good news and bad news. The bad news is that it will require OS 10.10, which I am not too eager to use, frankly.

Franz Grieser wrote:

Ulysses 2.0 will be a free update:
http://ulyssesapp.com/blog/2015/02/ulysses-for-mac-2-0/

I'm not a fan of 10.10 (the garish icon colors and ugly UI changes, mainly) but FWIW, 10.10.2 has been stable without any obvious OS issues. Only a few things died (PTH Pasteboard, for example) but by now most developers have caught up with Yosemite.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

For me that's good news and bad news. The bad news is that it will
require OS 10.10, which I am not too eager to use, frankly.

Franz Grieser wrote:
Ulysses 2.0 will be a free update:
>http://ulyssesapp.com/blog/2015/02/ulysses-for-mac-2-0/
>
>
>

Thanks, Paul. Always good to get a report from one of our crew here. I'll probably have to bite the bullet and upgrade.

Steve Z.

No problems here with Yosemite on a Mac Mini and a Macbook Pro 2009. Though, in my eyes Yosemite is the most ugly Mac OS X so far.

Franz

I confess I quite like Yosemite. Some of the decisions are baffling (like the change of the 'green button' function), but it's a pleasant environment. Although the convergence with the super-simple look of Windows 8 is definitely amusing. Designers. The more they try to be unique, the more they conform to trends. It must be some kind of Zeitgeist thing. Speaking of which, we've finally followed the Zeitgeist in the new look of our website - positively embarrassing (viewable at www.wordgym.com; comments - even rude ones - welcome!).

My main problems have been with Apple Mail. When Apple Mail goes wrong, it goes **seriously** wrong. Like, system-crashingly wrong. Yesterday I spent 1.5 hours with an unfortunate support person, who ended up dabbling around in my KeyChain setup(!!!), trying to find out why I couldn't send e-mails despite the fact Mail's 'Connection Doctor' was having no difficulty connecting to the SMTP server.

In the end, a simple reboot sufficed. Doh!

But later yesterday afternoon, a simple deletion of all the e-mails in my 'Spam' folder caused Mail to crash not just itself, but the entire Mac. Spontaneous reboot! Again!

Fortunately, I had saved the rather large document I was working on just seconds beforehand.

So I've swapped back to Airmail 2.0 (previously I was using Airmail 1.0 before Yosemite came out; excited by reports of Apple's improvements to Mail, I then discarded Airmail: mistake!).

Despite some negative reviews on the Mac App Store, Airmail 2.0 is actually very good; even better than Airmail 1.0. Remarkably fast (especially when compared with the ongoing disaster that is Outlook for Mac, which simply can't cope with multiple IMAP accounts), and amusingly colourful.

The new version of iOS (8.1.3) has, incidentally, magically speeded up my iPad 2, which has made me a very happy bunny! It's like chalk and cheese!

A bit of sniffing about and some correspondence with Soulmen has revealed that yes, they are producing an iPhone app (eventually).

Making Ulysses for iOS an even more tempting prospect. It's already got one of the fastest sync setups with Daedalus.

Contrast this with Letterspace, which is, in many ways, superb. One of the best hybrid Markdown editors out there. But the synchronisation is deffo hit and miss. That's partly because they're using iCloud, but partly because there's clearly some kind of polling issue that doesn't always work. Anyway, the nice folks at Letterspace have assured me that updates are imminent.

A tight race between Ulysses and Letterspace can only be a good thing for all us CRIMPers! With Quiver acting as a very exciting outsider coming up the back straight...

I haven't used Ulysses, although I spent quite an enjoyable hour this morning writing in Daedulus, which is a brilliant bit of programming.

But I wonder if someone could enlighten me about the advantages of Ulysses (and I think Scrivener, too). As I understand it, both have these similarities:

- an editing panel that handles Markdown. I get that some environments are cleaner and more fun to write in.
- a "notebook" type panel (or panels) that allows for the collection and some kind of re-arrangement of notes, snippets. That re-arrangement piece of a library of related notes is the outlining connection.

So I'm guessing the eagerness to have Ulysses on the iPad rather than just Daedulus is that ready access to the library of snippets. Is that right? Or is it the re-ordering of that information?

Just as an aside, when I look at Letterspace, I don't really see a difference (other than support for the tasks markup, and the use of gestures) between that and Simplenote. That is: a collection of individual notes, searchable, taggable,with a nice editor attached. But Letterspace is limited to iCloud, whereas I can get to Simplenote data from any device. And I don't see the ability to manipulate the order of anything.

Have I got this right?

Just speaking for myself, the advantages of Ulysses and Scrivener go way beyond any markdown capabilities, though they both handle markdown nicely -- Ulysses especially is built around markdown as an editing environment. What they both do, as you allude to in your comment about the "notebook" panel, is to do your writing in as small a segments as you want and need, then you can re-organize them as needed. They both also let you read your total document in one window, so you can see what you've written as a whole, rather than simply a collection of segments.

Scrivener has a lot more whistles and bells for managing your work, collecting research and more.

As for why I'm looking forward to Ulysses for iPad, there are several functions in Ulysses that you currently can't use in Daedalus. For example, regular Ulysses documents have an attachment bar, which allows you to associate notes, images and files with the open document. But if you're sharing files with Daedalus, this feature is disabled, as Daedalus does not support it.

Steve Z.

jaslar wrote:

I haven't used Ulysses, although I spent quite an enjoyable hour this
morning writing in Daedulus, which is a brilliant bit of programming.

But I wonder if someone could enlighten me about the advantages of
Ulysses (and I think Scrivener, too). As I understand it, both have
these similarities:

- an editing panel that handles Markdown. I get that some environments
are cleaner and more fun to write in.
- a "notebook" type panel (or panels) that allows for the collection and
some kind of re-arrangement of notes, snippets. That re-arrangement
piece of a library of related notes is the outlining connection.

So I'm guessing the eagerness to have Ulysses on the iPad rather than
just Daedulus is that ready access to the library of snippets. Is that
right? Or is it the re-ordering of that information?

Just as an aside, when I look at Letterspace, I don't really see a
difference (other than support for the tasks markup, and the use of
gestures) between that and Simplenote. That is: a collection of
individual notes, searchable, taggable,with a nice editor attached. But
Letterspace is limited to iCloud, whereas I can get to Simplenote data
from any device. And I don't see the ability to manipulate the order of
anything.

Have I got this right?

Hm. I think there are a number of desirable features in the perfect Markdown editor. Nothing has yet combined all of them.

But first, Letterspace: the "different" thing about Letterspace is the combination of Tags (= hashtags) and Mentions (= @tags). Plus an extremely good Markdown editor with support for GitHub-style task lists (not many Markdown editors have this, in fact).

Going back to the perfect Markdown editor, in no particular order:
- support for access to different folders, and ideally different synchronisation systems (Ulysses, LightPaper, TextNut; Quiver to some extent)
- shortcuts to favourite folders/groups of folders (Ulysses, LightPaper, TextNut, Quiver)
- sidebar with good navigation options (see above) (Ulysses, LightPaper, TextNut, Quiver, Scrivener)
- tagging, ideally with support for multiple tags per note (Ulysses, Letterspace, TextNut, Quiver)
- a really good Markdown editor, ideally supporting hybrid Markdown (i.e. indicating what codes are doing even in "edit" view) plus editable HTML preview (Ulysses, Letterspace, Quiver)
- support for the widest possible variety of Markdown variants (including e.g. GitHub-style tasks, Multimarkdown tables etc. etc.) (probably only TextNut, so far)
- support for grouping of notes (Keep Everything, Ulysses, Scrivener)
- folding! (Quiver - kind of, FoldingText; a good Markdown outliner is sorely needed. I can only think of one so far: CottonNotes on iOS, and that seems to have died)
- a toggle allowing you to default to "view" rather than "edit" mode when reading notes (rather than editing them). I don't understand why more Markdown editors don't have this, in fact, since Markdown per se is actually rather ugly, despite its convenience. Keep Everything is a good example of an editor that defaults to preview mode - you have to switch to edit mode to change something (I prefer this in any case, it's just good discipline in my view)
- a good range of export options, including exporting of multiple notes or folders, into at the very least HTML, PDF, OPML
- cross-platform versions that all have more or less the same features (Letterspace, eventually also Ulysses, maybe also Scrivener, hopefully also Quiver)

That's my basic list of criteria for evaluation of a new Markdown editor. I like FoldingText, but dislike its lack of cross-platform support and idiosyncratic weirdness. I don't much like dual-pane Markdown editors - I'd much rather be able to fix preview as the default option when I first open a list of notes. Of all of the dual-pane options, LightPaper is by far the most elegant.

You'll see I don't mention a whole bunch of highly thought-of editors such as Byword, Writedown, iaWriter, Write etc. etc. That's because they're not differentiated enough and don't do enough of the above. They are, in short, all showing their age. The most interesting developments are relatively new (apart, perhaps, from writers' favourites Ulysses and Scrivener, upon whom everybody is waiting with bated breath). On the whole, new apps such as Letterspace, Quiver, Keep Everything and TextNut are showing the way forward. That's probably why Soulmen have suddenly started pushing the iOS version of Ulysses.

Markdown is a brilliant concept, but it's one that originated with geeks who preferred working in VIM and other programming editors than soiling their Olympian minds with the overweight applications used by the hoi polloi. Aesthetics were never high on their list of considerations - speed, efficiency and transportability were.

In the meantime, other people have seen the advantages in this kind of slimmed-down approach. But there are some seriously boring/clunky implementations out there. And I wonder how many developers actually sit down and ask their regular users what they really like - and don't like - about their apps? I wouldn't know, I'm not a developer.

I'd love to hear others' criteria for evaluating Markdown editors, as well. Actually, we could open a new thread. Let's see if there's any interest first.

I'd also agree with Steve, incidentally, about the value of a total editing environment of the kind provided by Scrivener and Ulysses, and also Quiver. The ability to collect bits and pieces from various sources and attach them to notes is very valuable. Scrivener is especially impressive in this respect. An app that should be impressive in this respect but isn't, mainly because it's editor is so poor, is DEVONthink. But it stands out in other ways.

The Soulmen have announced that Ulysses for iPad (19,99E) and the companion upgrade for OS X (free) will both be release on March 12.

"Hooray, hooray, it's CRIMPing time toda... on Thursday!"

Yes, it's landed. And at first prod, looks really rather good, preserving all(?) the functionality of the desktop version.

Now Ulysses (especially cross-platform - sorry, Alexander, cross-Apple) offers a useful solution for Ken's task management dilemma. The three-pane approach is very powerful: an outline in the left-hand pane, a switchable list in the middle (which can either show all the aggregated notes from the node and subnodes selected in the outliner, or a single node at a time - a very powerful task management tool), plus a powerful editor supporting four different kinds of Markdown. No compromises there!

Plus tags, of course.

The only thing I'm missing at the moment: there's no font resizing option, although you can change line lengths and line heights (also very desirable). And for me, the default font is just slightly too large...

I'm looking forward to playing with it intensively. Just a bit too busy at the moment, unfortunately!

This review (http://t3n.de/news/ulysses-ios-markdown-editor-598758/ - German only) says the things missing from release 1 are:

* versioning (automatic backup of various versions of the document)
* import of RTF/HTML files
* global search/replace
* bookmarks

These features will be added soon, the Soulmen said.

I'm sure I'll have more positive reactions, but my first impressions of the desktop and iPad version is "ho hum". I don't understand the obsession with making every Yosemite app look like every other app, but the Soulmen have sipped deeply from that KoolAid. It's just an opion, but the UI for the pre-v2 desktop version was plesant and stood out. Now it's bland.

On the iPad, the initial settings are odd, but it's a simple matter to change them. The usual glitches with iCloud syncing -- which is an Apple issue not the Soulmen. Otherwise the interface is pedestrian just like Apple prefers.

No table support in either version. I happen to use a lot of tables but maybe that's just me. Would sure be nice to have the feature.

It's curious why the Soulmen decided to eliminate their stylish app icon in favor of an icon that looks like FreeMind's.

I'm sure someday I'll be pleased ;-)

Yes, kind of take your point, but I rather like the essentialised minimalism, myself.

Hadn't noticed the lack of search function - but yes, now you mention it, that's a glaring omission! Especially since the desktop app's search is so powerful.

Another thing I'd LOVE to see in all versions of Ulysses is the ability to link to notes, but hey ho. Sometime, no doubt.

The thing I love about Ulysses, and the thing that's been preserved in the iPad version, is the way you can move notes around, view them individually or in groups (as a single longer note) and so on.

And the other thing is the amazing filtering! Not only can you have conventional tags (though if you look carefully at the various onscreen icons, you'll see they're actually just simple filters), you can also set up your own highly complex filters. Even better, you can sort and arrange them precisely as you wish - Ulysses doesn't automatically sort on date created, alphabetical name or other irritatingly irrelevant criteria (one of the weaknesses of Letterspace, an otherwise impressive app). Instead, you can put notes, folders, groups AND filters anywhere you want.

This makes Ulysses perfect for task management, especially if you're using a variant of GTD, which I tend to do more and more nowadays. If you want to set up a filter for all production jobs needed now, you can do that easily; if you want to set up a filter for all admin tasks needed tomorrow, you can do that, too. And the nested way Ulysses operates means that unlike most task management systems, you can apply such filters very precisely, without having to have a bloated front end full of stuff you don't really need.

That's one of the things Ken has quite rightly focused on: the bloated nature of most task management systems. A model that's very flexible and allows you to break down your multiple tasks into convenient chunks that you can then look at without being overwhelmed by all the surrounding lists, tasks, tags, special filters and so on is really very important. It's one of the reasons Wunderlist has just added folders to its formerly rather rudimentary list management system - and it's much better for it.

But Wunderlist hasn't got a patch on Ulysses! It's well worth reading through the useful intro / details notes supplied with the app to find out just how flexible filters really are. Once you've grasped the basic concepts, they're very easy to use, and you can set up Ulysses so it's not overwhelming, by breaking things up into folders joined/separated by strategic filters and groupings (that's another clever feature that's made its way to iPad - grouping, i.e. the ability to group multiple notes together so they act as a single note; cleverly, this doesn't affect filters).

Ulysses is on the way to becoming a ConnectedText for Mac. Whoops - except for that inability to link notes together...

A cheerful Bill

Ah, except the grouping (or 'gluing', as Ulysses calls it) doesn't really work on iPad. If you glue multiple notes (or 'sheets', to use Ulysses-speak) together in the desktop app, you can view/scroll through them all as if they're a single note (however, you can only 'glue' contiguous sheets together, which is a shame).

You can also glue multiple notes together in the iPad version, but there's not much point, because the content isn't joined together. Shame. The fact you can do it, however, does suggest this feature is in the works.

And it's only version 1.0!

AAAARRRGH! Biggest... Fail... Ever...

Ulysses for iPad doesn't support folding. It does all the nice hierarchical bits, with nested groups showing up in views of parent groups, tags affecting the relevant nested sections, etc.

BUT! It doesn't support folding! So you can't move tags and subtags, or folders and subfolders, in groups. You have to move and reassemble them INDIVIDUALLY! Plus you have to scroll down for MILES just to view the sections of your hierarchy. How ridiculous is that!?!?!

Unless I'm missing something fundamental. Please, somebody tell me I'm missing something!

And why no folding? The horror, the horror...

On the plus side, while iCloud syncing is occasionally iffy, on the whole they've managed to get it working reasonably well. Which I gather from other developers is no mean feat. And their Markdown editor is pretty darn cool.

But still... so disappointed...

I don't know about the tags bit (I don't use tags) but for hierarchy groups this method works for me in the iCloud section of the Library.

* Click the iCloud section in Library, it will open and your list of folders will appear below
* Click "Edit" at the bottom of the left hand panel
* Click the ">" next to a folder and the panel will change to "Edit Group"
* "Edit Group" has a section titled "Parent Group", where there is a iCloud group; click the ">" next to "iCloud"
* The hierarchy will appear, navigate to the destination in the hierachy, click the new parent for the folder

Done

It's a long a fiddly process, and I really don't like it that we can only see hierarchies in the iCloud portion of the library but we cannot have groups and hierarchies in the "External Files" section. When a document is opened from an External File location there is no indicator anywhere where that file came from (Box, OneDrive, etc.) and the file does not sync back to that external location. Ulysses iPad does not support Dropbox. (There is snide remark on the Soulmen's blog blaming this on Dropbox.)

I agree that Ulysses iPad is very unfinished. It's yet another iPad app that was promised for a very long time, hyped by the community of tech bloggers, delayed and delayed, and then launched with far less than a full deck of features.

Ah, okay, yes, thanks for that, Paul, that didn't occur to me (it should have).

As I keep using it, I am in fact enjoying it – it's a lovely, clean environment, and I've used 'Any Font' to load my favourite fonts onto the iPad.

The lack of folding is a real PITA, but the grouping is efficient. Bugs I've found include:

- you can't see the full content of sheets that have been 'glued' together in the editor (fundamental difference from the desktop version); the glued sheets continue to appear individually in the editor pane.

- sometimes changing keywords (tags) in sheets will change the keywords in other sheets. There's no obvious reason for this, and it can be repaired in the Mac desktop version, but it's quite irritating. I spent around 20 minutes this morning changing tags in one sheet only to find they were also changing in another one; every time I corrected one, the corrections were also transferred to the other one. Aarrgh!

However, it is only a version 1.0, and from that perspective, actually quite impressive. It is possible to build a rather nice task management system in Ulysses, which is what I've been doing. The only extra feature such a system needs is reminders, but I can live without them (or use the Apple app if I really need them)!