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Notebooks as a Ulysses replacement
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Posted by Dellu
Aug 21, 2017 at 10:06 AM
Hugh wrote:
>There seem to me to be at least two such characteristics. They are: its
>facility to allow “chunks” of text to be quickly and easily re-arranged
>within the whole, and its feature enabling relatively straightforward
>export or “compilation” of the text in a wide variety of styles and
>formats. Those two features make it particularly attractive if you’re
>engaged in writing medium- or long-form work (and these plainly provide
>reasons for novelist David Hewson’s fondness for it). And it has other
>features which also support this type of writing.
>
That is true. Ulysses is best compared with writing (word processing) applications like Scrivener while Notebooks more comparable to noting applications like nvALT, and Tinderbox. If you want to get a finished product, Notebooks might not be the right one.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 21, 2017 at 01:26 PM
You are right, Hugh, if your primary use of Ulysses is writing longer-form pieces (as does David Hewson). What I’m looking for in a Ulysses replacement are these attributes:
- plain text/markdown editor
- iOS and MacOS clients that sync well
- easy ability to export work into other apps (namely Scrivener)
Even with that modest list, there are not a lot of options. If I added your two key characteristics, then there is no replacement for Ulysses. But I’m determined to avoid being sucked into their subscription model. So compromise is necessary. That work done in Notebooks can be easily imported into (even sync’d with) Scrivener (which also handles the two key characteristics) makes it a viable alternative for me. Still testing it, though.
The reason Scrivener isn’t a replacement straight up is that Scrivener is built around project documents. It’s not really designed to handle both random notes and compositional writing.
Steve Z.
Hugh wrote:
Doesn’t Ulysses have one or two key characteristics which any potential
>replacement ought to match or exceed?
>
>There seem to me to be at least two such characteristics. They are: its
>facility to allow “chunks” of text to be quickly and easily re-arranged
>within the whole, and its feature enabling relatively straightforward
>export or “compilation” of the text in a wide variety of styles and
>formats. Those two features make it particularly attractive if you’re
>engaged in writing medium- or long-form work (and these plainly provide
>reasons for novelist David Hewson’s fondness for it). And it has other
>features which also support this type of writing.
>
>Notebooks is of course, as its name suggests, primarily a note-taking
>application (and it’s a very good one). In other words, it’s an
>application primarily designed for writing and managing short-form text.
>Of course, there’s potential for cross-over between Notebooks and
>Ulysses: in the past I’ve certainly read of some users deploying Ulysses
>when Notebooks or its rivals might seem the more obvious tool, and I’m
>sure the opposite is also true. I’m sure that you could write “War and
>Peace” in Notebooks - but you could also do so in countless
>applications. But if you want software that will match Ulysses’
>attributes as closely as possible, it seems to me that Notebooks will
>leave you somewhat disappointed.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 21, 2017 at 02:06 PM
Have to say that the new Keep It (I’m playing with beta 2 at the moment, alongside my usual work) is quite a nice authoring tool in itself. There are still a few bugs (I’m making a list), but it’s already very stable.
It’s got a lot of different options for categorising stuff: folders, bundles (like “virtual” folders, so you can include a single note in multiple bundles), labels (not quite sure how useful they are) and tags. It’s easy to import/export all kinds of stuff, it’s also easy to share all kinds of stuff (it already offers iCloud sharing, presumably based on functionality that will shortly be introduced alongside iOS 11), and it’s got a very nice “window always on top” feature (I wish more notetakers had this) that allows you to float it over other windows in “Compact” mode. Very sensible!
Documents are kept as separate files (albeit in Keep It’s own format) and can be viewed in the Finder. The Search function is powerful, and while it doesn’t automatically highlight hits in the way that Ulysses or Bear do, there’s a micro-search function for each note that automatically picks up the umbrella search term you’ve been using: this does highlight the hits.
Finally, like Together, Keep It is mind-bogglingly efficient: just 12.4 MB in my Applications folder. Presumably because it makes clever use of existing Apple components (rich-text editor, Spotlight etc.). I’m really rather taken with it.
What I’d like to see would be a separate tags tree like Quiver’s (ideally with a tag hierarchy like 2Do’s), and maybe a labels tree too (hey, why not?). And while Keep It supports styles, they appear to be built-in (i.e. non-editable); that needs to change, too.
Very nice version 1.0 coming up, however…
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 21, 2017 at 02:09 PM
Sorry, I didn’t finish off my authoring thought. Something like Keep It is ideal for authoring, in many ways, because notes can be edited in separate windows, or in separate tabs, or both. Although it doesn’t support the impressive Ulysses “multi-note” view (where you can amalgamate the contents of multiple notes into a single one), I wonder if that really matters?
The tags, labels, folders etc. would make it easy to keep track of characters, plot lines, chapters and so on (or of different themes/topics, subjects etc. in an academic/technical paper). And the ability to import and index more or less any kind of document would make it easy to keep reference material alongside your written work.
So not unlike Notebooks, in fact, but with the advantage of being slimmer and more elegant (at the moment; prove us wrong, Alfons!).
Posted by Hugh
Aug 21, 2017 at 03:34 PM
Thanks for this summary, Bill.
I think the point about the multi-note (or Scrivenings) view is that its importance depends on what you’re writing. If what you’re writing is simply a short note, it’s unlikely to be important (although I’ve seen short texts where a multi-note/Scrivenings view was helpful).
But immediately the length of the text becomes such that structure is a significant part of your consideration whilst you’re writing - then the ability to change structure easily, and therefore to “chunk” and concatenate the text and experiment with its order become key parts of your work.