Ulysses Mobile
If you like words, you’ll love this app
Ulysses is one of our favorite Mac writing apps for all kinds of work: reviews, features, novels, broadcast scripts… you get the idea. It’s a very fast and flexible text editor based around Markdown, which enables you to format documents or add links and other code with a few simple keystrokes. It started off on the Mac, made its way to the iPad and now it’s on the Phone too.
Nobody’s going to pick the iPhone over a Mac for prolonged writing, but Ulysses makes it as pleasant as possible. Your formatting and code options are just a tap away from the keyboard, and it’s equally easy to access tags, file attachments, notes and writing goals. It’s much more fun on the iPad, but the iPhone app makes good use of the space – and if you have an iPhone 6s, of the bigger screen.
Ulysses’ file management feels more like Mail than Finder: you create folders and subfolders, and then your documents are “sheets.” Those sheets can be dragged around from folder to folder, and they automatically sync over iCloud as you work on them.
Sheets can be exported as text, PDF, ePUB, HTML, DOCX files or email attachments, and you can copy to the clipboard in those formats – copying in HTML is a boon for anybody who needs to write for a web content system based around HTML tags. If you’re exporting in PDF, ePUB or DOCX you can also choose from different templates.
Writing in Markdown takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s worth it; it’s much faster than working in HTML and the ability to write in one simple way and then export in whatever format the client or destination app/ CMS wants is exceptionally useful. You can customize the markup on the desktop app and have that customization available on mobile. For example, if you’d rather not have Ulysses interpret square brackets as a hyperlink you can change the shortcut in the desktop app and the change will be applied to your iPad or iPhone too.
The closest equivalent to Ulysses we can think of is Scrivener, but Ulysses does things in a more minimalist way. There are lots of apps we like, but Ulysses is an app we love.
the bottom line. Ulysses’ publicity has focused on novels and journalism, but it’s great for scripts, blogs, and note-taking too.