Ulysses upgrades to Liquid Glass look

Ulysses is great for writing books, in my view, as someone who has never written anything close to a book. But I have edited enough books in my time – at that time I edited most books in Ulysses – to know a good apple when I see one. I only stopped using Ulysses when it introduced its subscription model. And, coincidentally, I stopped editing books.

For me, it was always a toss up between Ulysses and Scrivener, which I always saw as the plodding giant of the book writing world. But I always found Scrivener to be far too complex for my needs. With Ulysses I could get right down to the job at hand; with Scrivener I was always scrambling around searching for a way to add side notes or research that didn’t go into the final edit. As a result, Scrivener became a ‘nice to have’ app, while Ulysses became the ‘nice to use’ app.

Now, with its latest update, Ulysses rams that home. When the developers say this is a ‘major update’, they mean it.

The app has been updated across the board, including: the library, dashboard, quick open, toolbars, buttons, popovers for images, links and annotations: .

• Resize the dashboard (Mac and iPad).
• You can have the sheet list and dashboard open (iPad).
• The editor now has a large bottom inset, so the transitions from reading to editing and back are much smoother, especially when using the onscreen keyboard.
• You can now create new sheets from the Library (iPhone); these will either end up in your main Inbox or in ‘Project › Extras › Pending’.
• The iPhone on-screen keyboard gained a prominent close button.

On the menus for macOS, they have:

• Reworked both the main menu and many context menus.
• Typewriter Mode is gone; you can now activate the line marker or fixed scrolling or leave it off.
• The Markup Bar is now either on or off (there’s no more ‘automatic’ choice).
• You can now auto-hide the toolbar in full screen.
• You can now select themes from the View menu.
• Markup menus for paragraph and text are now available via the editor context menu.

And Revision Mode is now just another tab in macOS:

• Advanced text check, known as Revision Mode, has been moved into the main dashboard.
• You now simply activate the tab to initiate a check and the check will continue if you switch to another sheet.
• To end the check, just deselect the tab.

The list goes on, with changes to the Editor Focus, gestures, swipe and navigation, import and themes, with the ability to copy text for use in Substack and Basecamp thrown in.

Give Ulysses a try. You can download it from the App Store for free (requires macOS 14.0 or later) and give the tyres a kick. Satisifed? Complete your purchase by buying a licence.