Writing App 'Ulysses' Gains WordPress Publishing Support and More

How are people liking Ulysses compared to Scrivener? I do my literary work in the latter, and I've been waiting forever for an iOS version of Scrivener, but now that it's here I see it's missing iCloud sync which I consider mandatory. So I've been thinking of jumping over to Ulysses, but it doesn't seem as full-featured for literary tasks.

I've messed around in Scrivener for a while but never really took to it. I find Ulysses to be a beautifully designed and very functional writing environment. Lots of great features that stay out of your way until you need them. And the design is very Mac-like. As for iCloud syncing, Ulysses offers sync either via Dropbox or iCloud. I tend to use Dropbox because I'm used to it and I like how transparent it is -- and if for whatever reason I decided to stop using Ulysses, my files would all be sitting there out in the open in .md format that I could edit with any other text editor out there.

Not sure if this answers your question, but also be aware that there's a demo of the OS X version on the Ulysses site, so you can poke around a bit before you commit.

EDIT: Since writing this, I've decided to buy the iOS version, which was a pretty frivolous purchase since I don't write much on my phone if I can avoid it -- but it's still nice to be able to access my library. The iOS app is gorgeous and very very full-featured. You can customize the theme to the same one you use on your Mac, and you can even upload custom fonts. Very impressive.

This is my iOS update week! Beta4, documents from Readdle (long overdue update!) and Ulysses got an update.

I don't use Ulysses that often, but for easy, destraction free and hassle free writing it is unbeaten imho. I might even start blogging! If I would actually have something meaningful to tell.

just don't worry so much about having to use iCloud?

It's the sync service I use? I don't trust Dropbox, nor do I like how it sends deep roots into OS X for its syncing. Every dev should be supporting iCloud at this point if they're doing sync on Apple platforms. CloudKit is in my experience reliable.

I've messed around in Scrivener for a while but never really took to it. I find Ulysses to be a beautifully designed and very functional writing environment. Lots of great features that stay out of your way until you need them. And the design is very Mac-like. As for iCloud syncing, Ulysses offers sync either via Dropbox or iCloud. I tend to use Dropbox because I'm used to it and I like how transparent it is -- and if for whatever reason I decided to stop using Ulysses, my files would all be sitting there out in the open in .md format that I could edit with any other text editor out there.

Not sure if this answers your question, but also be aware that there's a demo of the OS X version on the Ulysses site, so you can poke around a bit before you commit.

Thanks, I'll have to give the demo a spin. To be honest, I've never been completely enamored with Scrivener. I find its "do whatever you want" philosophy too distracting for my brain when I want to get into the meat of writing a new chapter or a quick idea. I prefer something that gives me the tools to focus on specific writing tasks and presents them in elegant, intuitive ways. But, Scrivener is very powerful for some tasks and it's been the de facto tool for many, so I've continued to use it over the years.

I was going off the screenshots on the website. It's a very bad looking website, so that was probably skewing my opinion. I grabbed the demo and it looks a bit better than it did on the site. It's not bad, but for my taste, there's just way too much going on. Ulysses, to me, just feels like a lot of clutter is removed, and there's more polish. Obviously this is all highly subjective stuff. Not sure I agree with you about the "intuitive" part, but let's agree to disagree there.

It looks like Scrivener definitely holds a lot more stuff than Ulysses, which is meant really for text (though it does support attachments to some extent). The way I work, I'm way more likely to keep research materials and such in a folder in the Finder somewhere, synced/backed up through Dropbox, so I'm less likely to need all those extra features that Scrivener has.

Fortunately, both apps are available with free demos, which is something that makes me very glad there are alternatives to the App Store.

I agree it's subjective! I found Ulysses more cluttered! I could not get rid of some of the default folders which annoyed me!
I love having PDFs, pictures, websites and YouTube vids in scrivener. I can't remember if ULysses supports double-pane writing for writing and reference side by side? Or multiple documents open at the same time both on OS X and iOS? Couldn't live without that

It's good that scrivener has some competition but scrivener is easily the better app, including its iOS app now.

Care to elaborate why it's beter?

Speaking for the Mac version, I can honestly say I've spent so many hours using it that it's been well worth it to me. Having one single app that handles all (well, almost all*) my writing is quite valuable to me.

*they don't support Fountain screenplay format yet, which is a shame, since it's plain-text based and would be a great fit

Right - I am using the 10-hour demo version, so I'll see if I can learn more about it. I like a lot of the visual/UI features - I'm a novelist and because I spend so much time staring at my screen I have a tendency to be picky with fonts and background colours when I'm in the first draft - but I still haven't quite worked out how to change and apply the colour schemes. in fact I can't even figure out how to change the display to match one of the dark examples they have in their own screenshots!

But I do like the inbox-style organisation of pages/sheets.