The text editor for creative writers.
Where “Word” and “Style” are not
defined through buttons and palettes.
What is this?
Ulysses was developed mainly for writers who work creatively with text and want or need to realize large amounts of text. All currently available word processing systems on the market do not or just merely grasp the specific needs of this group.
Tell me more.
With traditional word processors and text editors, the user is either being promoted to the job of a type setter or needs to bother himself with other inadequacies those applications have. They were developed for a totally different area of use (note especially the programming tools).
Inadequacies?
But they're chock-full of features!
One of the biggest deficiencies of currently available systems is the total ignorance of the process of creative writing. No extensive text is written at once, in a single document. A story consisting of 200 pages results from fractions, starting points, discarded ideas and many more — all neatly distributed along a total of 800 pages, most likely with over 100 different documents, combined with notes, Post-Its, scribblings on the margins of numerous daily papers, beer covers, napkins and the back sides of photos.
Uhm... so 60s!
Transferred to digital standards this means in the worst case several hundred documents from a bunch of different applications that were put into different folders on the hard disk. The organisation of these pieces requires the writer to be extremely disciplined — a mind job that could have better been spent on writing itself.
How can Ulysses help?
Ulysses wants to set focus on the only thing that counts when writing: the text and its content.
That's it?
Ulysses also wants to enable the writer to fully concentrate on the story he wishes to tell, without hobbling his creativity by means of unnecessary burden and distraction. Someone who at least once in his life spent hours in a document searching for the correct way of formatting instead of using the time to tweak a title or heading, knows what it's about.
Anything else?
Ulysses wants to free the writer from the need to deliver and develop his text in predefined structures. Instead, the writer should be given the ability to form his own preferred structures — both within the text and in organising things.
And... how do you go about it?
The concept of single documents in the classical sense is dismissed. Text elements take their part and are organised in a project, the container.
Every text element has two editing levels: the "standard" text and a "note pad".
The ability to format texts in an optical way (bold faced, italics, etc.) is omitted - you can divide paragraphs into levels and set markers instead.
Visit the features page to get a quick overview of what Ulysses has to offer. Also make sure to check out the screenshots, or just go ahead, download your copy and test-drive at home, under real-life working conditions. We could talk all day — but nothing beats a hands-on experience.
