Hello.

I had announced this quite a while ago but have been hindered from starting earlier due to lack of time. However, here we are now — with the first issue of “Hidden gems in Ulysses”. In this series I will introduce a few smaller features that are not so prominent — neither in the feature list nor in the documentation. While these features are small, they might bring extra value and comfort to your daily writing. We have been asked to do so by many of our users in the past and here we go.

In addition, there will soon be several new introductory videos coming up. Basically they will cover how to get started and will explain the basic concepts. Götz is working hard on them, stay tuned.

The Text Trash

When writing a lot in Ulysses, every one might have come across the situation that you had to delete some text. Maybe one did a rewrite and now it’s the time to delete the older version. But not really. You still do want to keep this snippet or still want to have a way to reach back to it. Instead of copying and pasting it to the notes or some other “trash” document, there is a way more convenient way to do so:

Just select the text to be deleted and hit Shift-Delete. This will not only delete the text as you’re used to, but also place a copy of it in the text trash.

Now, where do you find trashed text if you want to reconstruct it? In the upper right corner of a Ulysses document you can find a little text (actually it’s a popup) saying something like “Notes”. Clicking on it will reveal a menu where you can select “Text Thrash” — and there you go. Please notice that you can’t edit the trash and therefor you can’t manually add items. The only thing you can do is to delete items permanently.

In summary: The Text Trash allows you to delete text without loosing it forever.

Thank you for reading, the next issue will come soon!
Max

Good evening,

just letting you know that we just released a minor minor release (namely 1.6r2) for both Ulysses and Ulysses core which do fix several bugs as well as bring back the beloved themes from Ulysses 1.2. Have fun and read you soon.

Max

Hello,

after one week of release stress, a weekend to settle down we’re back to work. And we got some things in the pipeline, too. We will start two new series, on textual and one video cast. The textual will be “The (hidden) gems of Ulysses”, the video series will be some more detailled introduction to each area. As you might know, we had that intro movie for Ulysses 1.5 and now we will create a set of movies for 1.6. This will also underline our current approach in first telling about the features we have before adding new ones.

And there is something else to announce. While most of you will not have recognized, we have extended the trial time for both Ulysses and Ulysses core to be

Now if that’s not good news? The trail time is now two complete month. Enough time to finish up a little project in respect to the a bit too limited time we had before. (The interface sias still 30 days when obtaining a trial license but the return panel should say 60 days as it should be in the registration window.) I hope you will like it, give us some feedback!

Hear from us soon. Max

Woohoo…

okay, okay, I know. It has been late in the evening, BUT we did it on July 1st. Ulysses 1.6 and Ulysses core 1.6 are finally out. What happened was that we just weren’t completely ready. Marcus was not part of the party this time so I had to do most things on my own, wrapping up the documentation, doing the website, finishing TWO applications. It all gets in your ways. Luckily, I had two helpers that at least took some huge parts off my shoulders.

Where are we now and where are we going to go?

This is the final Ulysses 1.x release. There will be a language update, there might be a maintenance release. But in the end, that’s it for Version 1. So you might wonder about Version 2. We’ll do this next. But we’ll take some more time.

In the end I really regret not having called Ulysses 1.5 2.0 and now having called 1.6 something like 2.5. This would have been more representative. And we lost a lot of focus for this reason. News sites and magazines are just not used to having dot releases bringing any significant new features. Dunno how apple does it with 10.4, 10.5, etc. I mean They look for something like 2.0 or “new release”, I guess. 1.6 looks unspectacular. We’ve lost on that front. And in my opinion it’s a pity.

And there’s another thing about this. Several users left us. Especially some always arguing about our style of development. “You are too slow”, “Why don’t you do this or that”, “Your company is dead, isn’t it?”, etc. When starting your own company, you’ll see yourself confronted with stuff like this. Most “active” users around want to have monthly updates, they prefer to rather update than work. We prefer to build bug-free updates and not having to do any maintenance release. You might know that this does not always work out, but in all reviews we get, there is at least one sentence like “this app is damn stable”. I think it’s a feature - and not a bug - to have a stable release.

The other reason we’re left for is the feature-set we provide. My impression is that the OSX world is somewhat crazy for “real OSX apps”. You don’t have crazy animations, you don’t have a 3D view of your preview texts in conjunction with the blue bar at the left and the same layout as iTunes or Mail? Just shut down. This makes no sense for the kind fo app you wanna do? Then the app is not needed. That’s it, is it? Products are made by it’s users, not by the developer. “He really listens to what we (= I) really really want.” (did I forget a few “really”s ?) This - at least in my opinion - directly translates to “he has no concept, he builds in every request”.

Then you come, having a concept. Sometimes saying “NO“. Sometimes saying we “have to think about it“. You get blamed for not listening. You get blamed for keeping your very basic idea, the fundamentals of your application. And you are said to not be listening. You are said to be dead, if you take several month to have your new features grow. Then you build them in and there are many of them. Built into the interface really carefully. No one notices this, because there is no additional colored big button.

Just to make it clear: I don’t want to blame other developers for their style. I just want to start a discussion about whether staying with every trend and following every idea is a good thing.

One more note: Have a look at these screenshots. Ulysses 1.0 and Ulysses 1.6. Please ignore the fact that Ulysses 1.0 was not made for Leopard. The tabs were different at that time. We got about factor 10000 for the feature count. You you see any really notable difference or the interface being bloated? Actually there are FEWER buttons than in the initial release. In the end, and to be honest, Ulysses 1.6 can also look like this. That’s why it’s no longer called 1.0.

I recently noticed that a few users came back. They said that other apps were too bloated. They said that they loved the strict idea of Ulysses.

Sorry this got so lengthy, I just had to speak things out. I’d love to hear your comments and opinions. Please see our forums as well.

Max

Hi folks.

Some of you might know, others might not. There is a day coming up in the near future, really important for our piece of software. I’m not talking about the Bloom’s Day here. Those of you who still have no idea might want to take a look at this…

We’re working hard on getting Ulysses 1.6 ready by that date. There are still some major features sitting in the line and hopefully we’ll get them ready by that date.

And there’s some more news to share. Ulysses will get a little brother, or sister if you prefer. The name will be Ulysses core. You might try to guess, but stay tuned for more info…

Max