I strayed from Scrivener long ago to Ulysses and found it a strangely complete writing studio. Appearances insist it won't do half of what Scrivener does. In usage, the only thing I found missing, really, was the cork board. Even with the new swim lane feature, I don't use the cork board much, so maybe that's why losing it doesn't bother me greatly. Splitting the Scrivener editor window is nice, but it's a little odd that each view of a document - edit window, copy holder, and reference window - all have different capabilities. The edit windows are the only full featured editors. I prefer opening a new window into a document, supported in Ulysses, and having all views all work the same. Binder collections are there in Ulysses. They are called filters. The metadata in Ulysses isn't as extensive, but it's practical. Ulysses plus Mindnode plus OmniOutliner works pretty well. That said, it's a stinkin' subscription. For some reason, I would prefer to pay twice as much a year on upgrades as a rental fee. On the other hand, syncing and document handoff in Ulysses is flawless. Start an edit on your desktop, leave it open while you dash off on an errand, edit on your iPad while away, leave the document open there and add a little more in the checkout line on your iPhone. When you get back at your desk, your still-open file in Ulysses looks as if you did all your edits on the one machine. Reliability seems good. I haven't seen Ulysses crash, and when I installed a 14 day trial yesterday, work from two years ago was right where I'd left it when I uninstalled the app in a snit over the subscription. No matter what, I'm going to keep current with Scrivener and pay their update fees as new versions come out. Literature and Latte is a writer's friend, and there aren't enough of them out there. To be fair, The Soulmen are very responsive, too, and can be found supporting little-guy writers in places like Nanowrimo. Am I crazy to be considering software rental? It's $40 a year, about what I spend in gasoline every couple of weeks in my motorcycle. Motorcycling and writing are both basic needs, although I could dust off the old Smith Corona and fade Ulysses' admission fees. I hate to encourage any company who supports subscriptions, but Ulysses is calling. I may have to answer.
I liked Ulysses, though it was always quite expensive. It was more expensive than Scrivener – ~€60, I believe – when it was still a one-time payment with obviously less capabilities. Even though, it was worth it for the clean, simple approach. For me, it had only one nagging flaw, which I realize may not be one for most others (and some might find it nitpicking): it defaulted its local backup to the Library folder. To me, user data like my manuscripts should not be saved there, and setting it up to save them where they belong (in Documents) appeared ugly, to me. But, that's mostly cosmetic, and I could have lived with it. That said, they totally bungled the transition to a subscription – with nag screens, not enough information beforehand, not enough information about the plans, and WAY too high a price point. On top of that, on their blog, they tried to justify their move with economic reasoning which did not ring true, given that people like literatureandlatte, for instance, can maintain (and upgrade it with new features!) a much more feature-rich product with a much lower price point. This made me angry enough that I abandoned them (before I even started really using it), and stopped recommending them. It's sad that they killed their product, for me, simply because of the bad PR and transition, because the product itself is quite nice indeed. That's all just not including the fact that I don't like subscriptions in general for such a product (which, in contrast to their claim, does not need constant development). Subscriptions are fine for services, and delivering a mostly finished product and bug fixes after that I do not consider a service. For instance, I wouldn't pay the extremely high Adobe subscription just to use PhotoShop and get updates and bug fixes. The thing is, Adobe offers a lot more than just the applications with their subscription (cloud space, access to resources like fonts, tools, artwork etc.). Adobe justifies their subscription with their shitload of other services on top of the applications. Ulysses simply does not have that. Currently, I stay with Scrivener, as it feels more home, and has all the things Ulysses offered, and then some , for a lot less. And there are markdown editor based products that do a great deal of what Ulysses does for lot less cash and one-time payments, for now (iA Writer, Falcon [which is sold for note-taking], Typora [which is still beta and thus free for now]).
I hear you. All valid observations. I was put off by Ulysses internal library, but I can focus down to an individual project, or an individual section within a project. It's actually not all bad. You have to store your stuff somewhere. I wish Scrivener had fully embraced styles. Or maybe I just never got comfortable with their implementation. My new iPad drove me back to Ulysses. I like the clean interface, and the perfect synching is really nice.
