This app is way too difficult to use. I spent an hour just looking up tutorials on how to change the background from black to white so that it doesn’t hurt my eyes to type on my iPhone. This app may have been good when it first came out, but now it’s so deep into its own user interface that I’m way behind the times for it and will never be able to use it. The fact that it’s more expensive than other apps is also a huge downside. It gets in the way of writing more than any other apps I’ve used. It’s a no from me.

I had tried to use Ulysses years ago, and gave it up. With the addition of LaTeX equations, it seemed it might be a better tool for me now, so I had a 7-day trial, which I just cancelled. The new equation feature worked fine for short equations. There is something funny about the way equation mode is triggered: you type $$ as if you were using a plaintext editor for TeX, but it brings up an editing box. A lot of the interface works the same way: you can start from markdown syntax, but you end up with a box. I don’t like this. I use markdown editors all the time which navigate much more gracefully between markdown syntax and markdown rendering. I published two books last year which started from markdown, so I was interested in the organizational features of Ulysses. A seven-day trial is not a good test, but I found it all very fiddly, with a complicated interface. For related reasons, I would not use Ulysses to store reference material. It’s capture of information from outside the app, e.g. web pages, does work, but it is nowhere near as good as other apps which can capture entire web pages into markdown. Finally, there is the subscription cost: it’s high enough that I can’t justify the cost in either time or money to learn how to use Ulysses, just to see if it could ever be useful to me.

I would give this an easy 5/5 stars if I was just rating the Mac app. But, since one of the major features is the cloud syncing and I can download it onto an iPad and IPhone I need to take into account its issues with the IPad. The app on IPad has now and has had for well over a year and issue with the apple Magic Keyboard. The one that acts as both case and keyboard. When using the app after a few minutes of use the touchpad on the Magic Keyboard becomes extremely laggy. You will click on an area and it will take 1-many seconds to respond. But, if you just touch the screen with your finger it responds immediately. I have even had issues where the lag happens to the keyboard too and each letter press takes seconds to respond. I have tried over the course of a year or more to work with Ulysses to fix it on my end but it’s a known issue that they said they are working but so far no fix. The app is amazing on Mac, no issues. The app is almost unusable on iPad with Magic Keyboard, so for that reason I give it a 4/5 stars. I really love the app and hope the Magic Keyboard issue gets fixed because then it’s an easy 5/5 stars.

Out here in the middle of nowhere, on a high windswept mesa in southeastern Arizona, I write colums and articles for The Tombstone News. I also write web, facebook, and instagram posts for our city tourism. Lots of small pieces, and today found that using my previous very simple text editor, the excellent Word Count Notes, that I could not search through my previous writings by keyword or article name. Which is no big deal, except as the years go by you really need that search recall ability.And that brings me to Ulysses. Got it today, will buy it as soon as the app pops up a 'buy me' notice. It lets me organize easily -- like Tombstone News > Columns or > News Stories. Or, fot the city, Marketing > Events > Paracon Ghost Festival > Press Release 1. You get the idea. Almost everything I do for PR is in plain text for distribution, no formatting. If I make ad or flyer, I'll either bring in plaintext or just write directly in the graphics program I use, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. For facebook and instagram? A Xara-made 1080x1080 JPG always displays correctly. Hope this helps. Five stars for Ulysses!

The writing experience here is decent. Not as good as something like Bear, but it has its good points: markup for editor’s notes, ability to reorder files, and a few other niceties.But be wary if you’re using this on both mobile and desktop. The syncing feature here is just awful. It often doesn’t sync, even with unsynced changes, until you re-open the document, make some silly change like adding a space, and then leave the editor. Even when it does sync, it’s often delayed. That sounds ok, but you quickly run into problems if you mark an edit in mobile, then later make an edit on desktop before iOS has gotten around to syncing. Then you’re left with two files with incompatible edits. Ulysses will alert you to this once it decides to sync, but it won’t point out what differs between the two files, so you’re left to scour the documents, then manually apply the changes of one to the other before you delete one of the two copies.(Also, if Ulysses support responds to this saying to reach out to them, know that this isn’t a problem with my particular installation, it’s just how Ulysses works.)

This is a great application for anyone looking to write a long-form work. In my case I was participating in National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) for this first time and found this app recommended as an alternative to Scrivener, which sees infrequent updates. Ulysses is great on iPad and iPhone, but there are a few bugs that I hope the developer can address before I continue my subscription.Issue #1: Keyboard/mouse support is buggy and slow. Whenever I had my iPad plugged into my desktop setup to type with a full size keyboard, I encountered slowness from Ulysses in responding to mouse clicks and keyboard input. This same slowness was never present when using the application un-docked. If you frequently use an iOS device docked in this way, beware this annoying behavior.Issue #2: Sync across devices is not always up to date, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to force a sync. I would frequently find that my iPhone didn’t have the latest version of my file from my iPad after a writing session, despite both devices having an active Internet connection. There should be a way to force a sync.

I had Ulysses when it first came out and you just bought it straight up and that was it. Then all of a sudden I am notified that I will have to start paying monthly. Even tho there were no in app purchases at first and then you made a separate app that had a monthly sub and abandoned the one I paid for. Now I get back into writing and I actually liked Ulysses, so I paid for the sub. I started back up with some traction and read the tutorials. Then I get into dividing my groups and filters and run into a problem. For some reason if I create something in one filter, but decide I want to move it to another one, 99% of the time it will only let me move it to a folder that I created it in. Even if I totally erase all evidence of it, start a new filter and paste just the body, it automatically gets sent to pending if it’s not the filter I created it in. IDK why in 2024, as long as I’ve known this product. This is a problem. I should be able to easily drag groups in and out of any filter I want to. So I just gave up. I tried everything. Every menu. Then it crashed. So since I’m still within 7 days. If this isn’t fixed I’ll move one to something that might be a little more user friendly. I use to be able to effectively use this app years ago even with the vague instructions, I could figure it out. But not being able to move folders around and crashing is so 1900s. I really am disappointed this app couldn’t even keep up with my work in the 12 hours I’ve been fighting to get it to work. I just. Don’t get it. And now that I think about it. When I really started going thru the app to figure it out. I saw very little change. It felt like I just DLed the same app from like iPhone 6 or something. Just a few additions, but nothing that justifies years of subs with little change.

I’ve tried both paid and trial versions of all the major competitors of Ulysses and this is my favorite writing app, and the one I’m going with. My uses include poetry, short-story, and novel writing, and I think this Ulysses is great for focused writing.I give 4 of 5 stars just for some bugs and minor usability issues that need to be fixed to make it perfect.On iPad there’s a problem with the Gauge control and word counts - it only ever applies to an individual sheet, even when multiple sheets are glued together. So, you can’t get word counts for your whole story or novel - just for the current section/chapter. I think this is just a bug - it works properly on macOS.The iPad is a very important platform for focused writing IMO. With my Bluetooth keyboard it lets me create a dedicated writing kiosk without all the distractions of my Mac. So I hope the iPad issues and usability differences from macOS can be fixed.Another general issue: Projects seem potentially useful, but you can’t put multiple related Projects together in a Group. But, you can add Groups to a Project. This seems backward to me, since “Group” is more of a folder/organizer concept. My workaround is just to ignore the Project feature and leave it turned off, and use Groups both as top-level organizers and for specific stories and projects.In spite of these issues I recommend trying Ulysses if you are looking for a focused authoring solution. Even with these issues I find it better than Scrivener and iA Writer for my creative writing workflow.

I like Ulysses and have been using it for a while. I have done enough in it now that I would really like to keep using it, rather than taking the trouble to migrate to a new platform. But the subscription model is really annoying and creates unnecessary disruption. Once every 6 months, my app just stops working. No reminder in advance, no prompt to re-up with a link that would direct me to the right place. I just sit down to start work, find I can’t, and have to try to remember how I fixed this issue last time. Please just let me pay for this thing once and be done. Going to have to switch to a similar product on a non-subscription model otherwise because the hassle is just not worth it.If you haven’t started using this app and are thinking about trying it — I’d think twice. There is a lot to recommend Ulysses but the longer you use it the more annoying the subscription thing becomes.

Ulysses is a clean, friction-free experience for all manner of writing — from blog posts to short stories. The seamless, iCloud synchronization across devices is solid, allowing me to work on my MacBook, my iPad, or on my phone. Other solutions require the use of an intermediary like DropBox to facilitate a synch and are unreliable at best. In fact, I made the switch after losing a day’s work to a synch issue. The baked in support for markdown is nice but I do find it a little clunky in the writing view. My lizard brain much prefers the WYSIWYG presentation of bold, italics, and others. I’m getting used to it but the nervous twitch may hang around for a while.The organizational tools are good once you wrap your head around the structure. However, I do feel project management is a place that could use further investment. The built in templates and management tools in Scrivener are just better as are the final publishing utilities. Enough of a disadvantage to use the clunkier, less reliable app? Nope. I’m happy here.Last note is that I’ve noticed some performance hiccups and off behaviors on iPadOS 17.5.1, running on on a maxed out iPad Pro (M4). The worst of these is a loss of control when using keyboard shortcuts to move around in the edit window (e.g., CMD+RGHT ARROW). A close and reopen usually clears things up but it can get frustrating fast. Fix that… they get their 5th star!Long story short, this app may not be the one you want to use to write your 500 page novel but, short of that, it packs plenty of punch and has been rock solid when linked to iCloud!