I just came across a writing app called Highland. If I'm getting it right, Highland is a revision of a scriptwriting app called Fountain, but has been modified to work with any kind of writing project.

https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/

Highland seems to have a lot of great features, including a whole host of markdown.

They say it is free to download, but once you do they offer you an introductory price of $30 to buy the pro version.

Steve Z.

Sorry, I guess Fountain is a type of markdown that Highland used to use before expanding to markdown. Most of you probably knew that already!

Highland has a fraction of the features of Ulysses, but the new version (which I bought) isn't bad. It handles extremely large documents too - this test (by the dev) shows it handling a 700,000 (?) word document faster and with less scrolling jitters compared to Word, Pages and IA Writer. (They seemed to deliberately choose not to compare to Ulysses.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehKDtQ3Dbhw

Ulysses has more and better themes, a themeable editor that Highland lacks, and a more sophisticated organizational setup, with hierarchical groups. Highland also isn't designed to handle attachments that aren't related notes, whereas Ulysses handles images and PDFs, and the upcoming version previewed the other day showed colored keywords.

https://ulyssesapp.com/blog/2018/04/preview-colored-keywords/

Highland is a good, future-proof option as an affordable app for writing screenplays (what it was originally designed for), but given Ulysses's feature set it's premature to call it a replacement, unless your use of Ulysses was pretty bare bones to begin with.

I see iOS isn’t even mentioned on their roadmap.

Nor is Windows. You'd think a "replacement for Ulysses" would gain more traction in the Windows world, which lacks anything like a Ulysses, versus the Mac world, which already has a Ulysses, with lots of happy users unlikely to switch, but hey...


Luhmann wrote:

I see iOS isn’t even mentioned on their roadmap.

It's not available from the UK App Store, either, alas... no CRIMPing for me...

MadaboutDana wrote:

It's not available from the UK App Store, either, alas... no CRIMPing
for me...

:(

Ah: I lied (albeit involuntarily). It wasn't available on the UK App Store, but now it's suddenly appeared. Looks quite nice, actually, even as a free version. Not sure if it's got enough to tempt me away from other tools, but it's certainly a great option for screenwriters.

Thanks for the update, Bill.