Ulysses III

Or organ. Overarching ORGAN metaphor. That’s the job.

But what I want to know is this stuff about dialogue indenting. Have I been missing something? You’re telling me, all these years I have been making of myself a putz, where I thought dialogue was like everything else, which you indented it five lousy spaces already and then just kept typing, a paragraph’s a paragraph and never mind it’s got some frail talking, her dress is torn, her makeup’s smudged, she’s standing in the doorway but behind her in the warm spill of light from the bankers’ lamp on the desk it’s a dead body geshlumpt, you want to read on buy a copy of When Rabbis Go Wrong out any day now when I get round to working out how to, excuse me for living, indent the dialogue.

So tell me. Don’t spare.

This Ulysses III: a fine piece of work. Scrivener also: a fine piece of work. Generous of Dr Blount to be so unstinting in his praise. As the guy said on the radio when they asked if he was worried that his movie was coming out same week as another big CG/animation film: “You don’t understand Hollywood. In order for my movie to succeed, it is not necessary that his movie fail.”

That’s a great quote - and spot on.

Thanks, Trip!

:open_mouth: I have to show this to my wife. She’ll never believe that anyone could ever think I was right about anything.

What do you call the current screenwriting mode? :slight_smile: The thing is, one nice - and unique - thing about Scrivener’s scriptwriting is that you can mix it in with other text. So you can write some prose, hit cmd-8 and add some script-formatted text, then hit cmd-8 and return to standard mode. I know some people write treatments that way, and I quite like it for drafting dialogue sometimes, too. So it’s a tough one.

All the best,
Keith

If my personal experience is anything to go by (and the world would be a better place, I assure you, if more people went by my personal opinion), then I’m actually MORE likely to go see your movie if there’s another good movie out at the same time.

I don’t go around saying to myself(*): “I MUST go see a movie on Friday. I’ll go and watch whatever happens to be the single best film out on that day, even if it sounds awful. Hell, even if it’s Anna Karenina”. I tend to go through phases of going to the movies or not, and a critical mass of good things to see will likely invoke a spate of popcorn purchase.

(*) I don’t really go around saying anything to myself. That would be weird.

Absolutely. If you want to open a restaurant, make sure you open it where there are other restaurants nearby.

:slight_smile:

Mark

And make it different from them! (That’s the part that’s often sadly omitted in today’s consumer industry.)

As at Version 1.0, U-III is just another notes editor. Like most (all?) App Store apps these days, it’s made for editing documents that it alone created although it does seem to export reasonably standard markdown docs (but with only a subset of markdown markup). It does drag-n-drop mages and it does links but not tables.

It is not a W Processor. It does footnotes and annotations (not sure what these are for) but it does not do citations in markdown format. You can create many ‘sheets’ in each folder but you can’t arrange them or search them (search works only on one sheet at a time). There are ‘keywords’ that may be used to filter/group sheets but nothing as elaborate or flexible as Scrivener’s Binder.

My biggest beef with U-III (1.0) is that it won’t edit imported marked-up text. In other words, it BREAKS the real liberation of simple text-mark-up… that it should be readily editable in a variety of text editors. U-III simply refuses to recognize any marked-up text that you import (by importing the folder as an ‘external source’) and if you ‘export’ this text it disables (escapes) the mark-up so that it can’t be directly used in another editor or previewer.

The reason seems to be the need to preserve the pretty, but app-specific, markup widgets that Ulysses presents to the user. In other words, the simplicity and interoperability of marked-up text is forfeit to yet another cute interface.

U-III seems to work with iCloud OK. But I don’t trust the absolutism of iCloud (‘our way or no way’) and its insistence on deleting (everywhere) any files that you no longer wish to maintain on iCloud. The Dropbox integration in U-III really bogged down for me. It was slow and the markdown files I imported from Dropbox were not editable (see above) so I gave up.

Not for me, I’m afraid. I sent the SoulMen an email (rather than grouch on their App Store page). I hope they fix these things in the next iteration. Along with the frequent crashes.

Peter

@michaelbywater Wow. I have always, since my first tentative keystrokes, used the Tab key to indent dialogue, as one key press is faster than five. Nobody, in the long line of people involved in transforming my schlumpy drafts into published books, has berated me for doing so, or taken me aside to say, ‘listen old chap, this is a bit embarrassing, but about these tabs you insist on using…’ But please - and I mean this most sincerely - please tell me if I am doing it wrong. I could see that in Markdown you would have to use the five space workaround as my experience of it (and yet again I may be guilty of syntactic abuse) is that an indent will indent the whole paragraph, not just the first line.

Aha!

Well, yes, indeed, just exactly what I do at the beginning of every paragraph, whether by hitting the key or setting a paragraph first-line indent. We all do it. I am glad I’ve not been doing it wrong all these years…

But the Markdown thang… as far as I can see, U3 does that pretty much automatically when you send it off to PDF or RTF/Word. First line of a chapter (anything under a heading, actually) full left, everything subsequently five spaces in.

It’s blank LINES that are the problem…

Having purchased Ulysses I must admit it does feel very much like a V1 product that’s strongly inspired by Scrivener (although some may say that Ulysses provided many of the design cues for Scrivener in the first place). The thing that I’m most nervous about is committing to iCoud as a storage platform given all the well documented problems of iCloud synchronisation. This nervousness is multiplied by the lack of data portability with the core Ulysses data storage scheme. You can of course set up Ulysses to work with Dropbox but it loses some of the core features that make the app attractive in the first place. The reality is that whilst the iCloud workflow is smooth and ‘frictionless’, the Dropbox workflow feels clunky in comparison.

I’m glad I purchased Ulysses especially considering it’s current reduced price but think it’s a little off being ready for prime time usage. In many ways Ulysses has only made me long for better plain text/Markdown support in Scrivener (which to my mind, remains a far superior application for writing long-form documents).

On a positive note the manner in which the edit window formats Markdown for readability is the best implementation of this kind of auto-formatting functionality I’ve yet come across. This is especially useful if your Markdown documents contain lots of links be they inline or reference links. Plus as has been highlighted elsewhere the interface is incredibly elegant and offers lots of powerful options without extra clutter.

My one bugbear with the Markdown readability rendering engine is that the preview HUD doesn’t preview images that are hosted outside Ulysses (this is especially irritating for notes that started life as captured web pages or if you use cloud based services to host all your Markdown note images as I do). Even more irritating is that the auto-formatting tag placeholder doesn’t allow you to display the images alt text so all you see is a pink IMG tag. And another minor bugbear I came across in the editing window is that it doesn’t allow for strongly emphasised text (Something I personally use quite a lot). These small niggles are the only real negatives of working within the edit window and I’m sure it’s something that will be adressed in a future update.

I think that Ulysses gets a huge amount right but outside of the editor niggles discussed here I have a fundamental disconnect with storing my data within the ~/Library/Containers/ file structure, especially considering those files are given unintelligible file names. I certainly don’t subscribe to the UX theory that files & folder structures need to ber reinvented because they are in some way outdated. The Scrivener way of handeling the same functionality as Ulysses is so much more flexible, open & portable - each .scriv project file being a bundle of all the projects support files be they .txt, .rtf, .pdf etc. This means that Scrivener can support things like notes, comments & attachments in an open manner and in a way that works with other proven cloud services such as Dropbox.

My final criticism of Ulysses is that in trying to make Markdown more usable for non “text-geeks” they’ve attempted to reinvent a wheel that didn’t need reinventing. The whole raison d’être for using Markdown plain text files is data portability that survives roundtrip editing across multiple platforms/editing environments. Their combination of stripping back existing Markdown sytax whilst adding new bespoke syntax that’s only supported by Ulysses goes completely against the use cases that drove John Gruber to create Markdown in the first place.

Even with all these current V1 bugbears, I can see Ulysses becoming central to my writing workflows (especially writing intended for the web) but it has a long way to go yet.

So can one have a new paragraph that is not indented in Markdown? I couldn’t see how that was done :confused: Questions questions.

Ps I think I may have taken your original response to my post literally :frowning:

The way that Markdown text is formatted is down to the styling such as that provided by CSS (for web output) as can be seen in this example from the Marked app: markedapp.com/images/markedstyles.jpg

Markdown itself just separates the structure of your content from the end presentation style. If you’re outputting to a traditional Word processor such as Word your initial RTF file will look very much like basic un-styled HTML but you’re then free to use Word to style your document however you wish.

Yeah, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. In fact, back in the day, I think I was one of the people requesting that feature, and before Fountain I used it every day.

It seems to me one way to “hide” the Scriptwriting element is to actually elevate it to its own menu. You’re not limited to 9 menu items, right? Apple’s own Pages has 10. I feel like doing that might put Scriptwriting in its proper place — if you want to do it, there it is, but regular users won’t have to deal with it. I mean, obviously it already is its own menu item… I don’t know, something about putting it as a main menu seems to both elevate it and tuck it away.

Two quick thoughts about the preferences issue. I keep thinking about my wife’s suggestion when I’m overwhelmed by any organizational task: Make like-piles. And I think that begins with a standalone Fonts pref pane. Creating a Fonts preference pane — just that alone — will simplify, by my count, 4 different preference panes. That’s my radically simple solution.

Here’s my radically unsimple (read: undoable) solution, which will cost millions of dollars and thousands of lives. It’s not a request, just a possible note to add to a Scapple project sometime.

Squarespace (which, I know, is HTML and totally different) has a mode that allows you to click on elements of your Squarespace 6 website in a main window, and in a sidebar it brings up the stuff you can change about that element (color, font, whatever). Change those elements (they all have pop up menus), click save and you’re done. Here’s an example:

I keep wondering if that visual approach works for apps. In fact, Scrivener already does this in a way with the Main Text Style preference. That thing is genius, as is the Use Formatting In Current Editor box. I wonder if there were more interface elements that could be changed in the same way. Short of being able to snap into a “Customize” mode as with Squarespace, is there a way to apply the visual “make it so” functionality of the Main Text Style Box to other elements? Like, what if you made a bare-bones Scriv mock up in the preferences, and… I can’t explain it. Here’s a 5 min mock up:

I’m saying that the above is an actual preference pane. Is that insane? It seems insane. I should get out more. I’m going to go work now.

Best,

SC

I received a courteous reply from SoulMen support to my questions about U-III’s refusal to edit text already marked-up using (Multi)Markdown. They confirm that it won’t and it appears that they are sticking with that choice. They say they can’t accommodate markup created outside their App because they want to “free the user from all the complicated details of Markdown and other markups” by using their own interface widgets (e.g. for foonotes, links, images etc).

To me, this is bizarre. “Freeing the user from complexity” is what lightweight text markup schemes such as Markdown and Textile are FOR, already. They eliminate the overhead and complexities of HTML, LaTeX and resT, not to mention RTF and XML. They do this well and there’s no need to break with that essential function — except for marketing reasons.

Lightweight markup is intended, I believe, to GUARANTEE compatibility between marked-up texts or at worst to offer transparent and non-fatal fall-backs when markup varies e.g. between versions of Markdown. U-III breaks this model. Thus Fletcher Penney has been careful to ensure that Multi-Markdown is a super-set of Markdown. John MacFarlane’s wonderful Pandoc, too, provides extensions of Markdown that accommodate both Markdown and MultiMarkdown (not to mention resT, Textile etc).

Users benefit from this guarantee in many ways, not least of which is that our data is our own. We can be sure that whatever environment we choose to work in, in the future, our marked-up texts will be accessible and (more or less) identically represented by viewers/browsers.

But U-III is apparently designed (like many programs on the App Store, alas) not to respect my ownership of my own data (text). It wants to own the data for itself, by using a proprietary approach to creating markup that renders it incompatible with other markdown editors.

Sad and stultifying.

Peter

I wholeheartedly agree with everything your saying here. The beauty of Markdown is it’s simplicity and it’s faultless roundtrip editing behaviour. I hate to say it but it’s increasingly looking to me like SoulMen are riding the coat-tails of the current buzz around all things Markdown without being true to the things that make Markdown such a great technology.

Peter, could you give an example of this limitation you are describing? I just tried doing what you said, creating a document using MD in iA Writer, then importing in to Ulysses III, and it opened fine, using all the correct styling and their widgets in place of my manual footnotes. I added some text, then exported it out to iA Writer, and everything was fine. I must be missing something. Many thanks.


Update: Perhaps I do see it. I just noticed that it changed the custom name of one of my footnotes to a serial number instead. Perhaps there is more like this?

Apologies for butting in here.

Ulysses recognises three types of file - plain text (.txt files), Markdown XL (a bespoke version of Markdown that is like a hybrid of Textile & Markdown with some unique syntax that is only recognised by Ulysses) and Markdown itself (a slightly watered down version of John Grubers original syntax). It doesn’t at this stage recognise Multi-Markdown and I believe this is what Peter was making reference too.

Coming from a completely different perspective, as someone who doesn’t use markup but who generally uses barely any formatting at all (a sort of puritanical strain of rich-text writer), I think that the combination of Ulysses III and Daedalus Touch has just solved the problem I have had with finding a note-taking application that I am comfortable with on my iPhone but which is easy to integrate with the rest of my life on my Mac. I don’t have any real desire to write stuff on such a tiny screen, but I do sometimes need to jot things down if they occur to me when I am out of the house – all sorts of material, from work-related notes to shopping lists to actual writing for a number of purposes. And I don’t want to faff about with getting it into an appropriate application on my Mac according to the type of material it is; I want flexibility without having to do endless import/export or cut/paste or moving files around on my hard disk.

While the main “keyboard” of Daedalus Touch is no easier to type on than any other iPhone app I have used, the keyboard extension row is great for things like quotation marks and brackets, which are ususally a real pain in the neck. (I don’t use much formatting, but I am fond of punctuation!) So that’s handy, for a start. And a simple, easy form of markup is very handy when writing on a device with limited text functionality. I know, I know – that’s Daedalus, not Ulysses, but I’m sort of reviewing them as a double-act. And I’m coming to the Ulysses bit now.

Other apps I have tried have felt clunky in terms of getting the information out of the iPhone and into something more sensible on my Mac, but viewing the material in Ulysses III is effortless. The Ulysses application is just sitting there, waiting to update itself with the latest notes from Daedalus, made large enough so that I can read them, and maintaining the stacks-and-sheets structure so that notes on disparate subjects aren’t all jumbled up together. Couldn’t be easier. At least, it couldn’t be easier after I realised that there was a hidden “Show” button in Ulysses III which would actually display my Daedalus notes; up until that point, I was getting rather frustrated with my apparent inability to get iCloud to work.

Putting material from Ulysses onto the iPhone (in Daedalus) works equally well, too, making it easy to take notes out with you. Creating groups in the “Daedalus” section of the Ulysses sidebar, and adding sheets to them, updates the contents of Daedalus in a matter of seconds, with no further action needed beyond the creation of the stacks and sheets. Quick and simple.

When I have processed the text, copying it from the “Daedalus” section to the “On my Mac” section, or exporting it elsewhere, I can just delete it from Daedalus, and that’s it gone from the cloud. At least, I hope it is. Looking at the “Documents & data” contents via “Manage Storage” on the iPhone, it’s a bit hard to tell from the obscure filenames, but files certainly do seem to be removed when sheets and groups are moved to the Trash.

The export options from Ulysses III are quite handy. There aren’t any options for directly exporting to Scrivener, but Ulysses does offer a range of relevant applications suitable for opening various flavours of TXT, RTF and PDF file, without having to save to disk first (although you can do that, too), and the most recent selection for each is conveniently saved on a button to speed up the process next time. A couple of them are a bit odd. In all my years of working with text, I have never felt the urge to open an RTF document in System Information, but perhaps I am just blinkered by convention.

What is working really well for me is the “Copy to clipboard” option, which means I can very quickly paste the text into Scrivener’s scratchpad, and from there despatch it to its final destination in the appropriate Scrivener project. With a note consisting of a name and address, I even output the text straight to FormalAddress for parsing into my Contacts application. The process for both workflows feels smooth and speedy.

What don’t I like about Ulysses III? The lack of customisation of the colour scheme. Normally I couldn’t care less about customising interface colours, but I’m getting old and my eyes ain’t what they used to be, so I simply can’t see grey-on-charcoal text, and the “pure” and “dark” modes just aggravate the problem. As far as I can tell, I can customise the markup colours but there isn’t a lot of control over the interface itself. The Soulmen’s website has leanings in the same grey-on-black direction, so I guess it’s a style thing.

All in all, I’m very glad I bought Ulysses III today, and its little iPhone friend, Daedalus. The combination has already proved to be genuinely useful, fitting easily into a number of information-transfer processes, and even making them smoother than my usual methods. I don’t need another long-form writing application, and I don’t currently intend using Ulysses in that way (although you will notice that I couldn’t resist buying yet another word processor, junkie that I am), but I really do believe that Ulysses III and Daedalus together are brilliant for other shorter writing tasks that I need to perform every day. Ulysses has won a place in my dock.

I feel pretty much the same way, and I really like the Daedalus connection too, but I also agree with Peter that these (now confirmed) restrictions don’t seem to be in the original spirit of MMD.

The sticking point is that if U-III is being marketed as a new text editor, competing with Sublime or MMDC2, then it’s not going to work as such just because of those restrictions; but their new marketing tag is actually `All your texts. In one place. Always’ which indicates that round-trips are not expected (or encouraged) and so that this is not really intended as a general text editor in a larger work-flow at all.

It seems to be working nicely for me as a place to write relatively self-contained, relatively short (2-3,000) review-type articles. I write one a month and they (quite literally) pay my rent, so anything that helps here, helps a lot. Yesterday I included my nvAlt notes Folder (a mixture of .txt and .md files) on DropBox as an `external source’ in U-III, filtered it to get the relevant notes, and with its quite lovely working area it turned out to be a very good environment in which to write these articles. It’s not going to work so well, for me, for bigger projects, or those that require better access to and integration of research material, or those that require MMD round trips - but then that’s what I have Scrivener and MMDC for.

Horses for courses, as always; the only problem, I suppose, is if any misleading marketing implies otherwise.

Cheers,

Eric

I haven’t tried Ulysses III yet – I don’t know if I should be spending money on yet another piece of software when I haven’t got any money. But I note that Brett Terpstra has indicated that he will be doing something with Marked that may help export: he says of Ulysses, “You can export your documents to RTF, PDF, TXT or HTML. In the near future — when the next version of Marked is officially released — integration with Marked will be tight.” See his blog post:

brettterpstra.com/2013/04/03/mac … ysses-iii/

Martin.

I feel this actually promotes it too much rather than tucks it away. Any user trying out Scrivener for anything other than scriptwriting will suddenly have that menu in their face, and it might feel that Scrivener is too geared towards scriptwriting for such users; it might also encourage our vocal screenwriting contingent to demand that, seeing as Scrivener boasts about “Scriptwriting” in its menus, it now at last implement MORE and CONTINUED etc. :slight_smile:

Now, if it were promoted but could be hidden, that might work, but I’m not sure that the HIG allow main menu items to be hidden like that, as the idea is that the menus act as a way of discovering features.

I’ve been doing that today! I’ve been going through every preference and assigning it a category in OmniOutliner, trying to work out a better system of organisation. It’s hell, though, because as soon as you start putting things together, you realise there are other things that sort of belong with them. (E.g. “Media background colour” and “Use smooth line art in PDF files” - both media-related, great! Until you realise that the media background colour can be set differently for QuickReference panels and full screen mode, too…)

The trouble with this is that you would also need a separate Colors pane. But that’s fine. My current thinking - and I’m still experimenting - is to have the “Appearance” pane have sub-tabs, like OmniFocus’s Sync Preferences pane:

There would be three tabs: “Options”, “Fonts” and “Colors”. Each tab would have a sidebar listing interface elements.

That, at least, is the best I’ve come up with so far - and it should reduce the proliferation of panes and sections quite significantly if I get it right.

Yep, that’s pretty insane! There’s just no way of doing that in an OS X app. Well, you could, but I’d essentially have to rebuild the entire interface out of custom views which take font and colour instructions and various other options, and then swap out the real interface for that interface and… Argh, I’m getting scared just thinking about it.

All the best,
Keith