As far as text editors go, I’ve long loved Ulysses, for the Mac — like, nine years, I’ve loved it: it was the first distraction-free writing tool that I ever found, along with integrated notes and other high-context features. Writing a design document, writing a novel, writing a letter, everything was faster in Ulysses.
But it’s always felt like a closed system, and after having used an iPad for three years now, I was beginning to migrate over to Pages, which seamlessly syncs across Mac and iPad. I need a distraction-free writing tool, with no little bits of interface visible while I’m writing, just me and the text and the background of the page. Pages comes super-close. The frustrating thing about Pages is how it can only think about text as, well, pages, like physical pages with physical boundaries and generous margins on all four sides. But when I’m writing, I don’t want to be aware of how the text lays out on the page. That’s not how the text is going to be laid out when it gets published, so page breaks are distracting.
Yesterday, Ulysses III came out. It can use Apple’s iCloud to sync writing projects and their documents between a Mac and an iPad, thanks to their iPad app, Daedalus Touch. Their touch app uses a different — and extremely satisfying — visual model for managing projects and files. It’s not inappropriate that their two apps have different names, and it’s super-lovely what they do together.
Today, I’m using it to put together some finished chapters for the second Hero Worship book. Now that I can smoothly bounce between the two devices, I think it’ll go a lot more quickly. Here’s to hoping.
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